


when he gets older, he might be the one

by cobaltmoony, CoraRochester



Series: when he gets older, he might be the one [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Age Difference, Anal Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blow Jobs, Commander Rogers, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, NSFW Art, Non-Graphic Violence, Old Man Steve Rogers, Post-Winter Soldier, RE: UNDERAGE WARNING: Steve is in his early twenties and Bucky is seventeen; consent is freely given, References to Comic Storylines, comic-inspired Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-10-29 08:36:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17804693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cobaltmoony/pseuds/cobaltmoony, https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoraRochester/pseuds/CoraRochester
Summary: In which a freak run-in with the Cosmic Cube ages Steve into his fifties, and Bucky— still trying to figure out who he is after decades of brainwashing— decides it’s time to come home.





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> This story will be updated daily between March 8th and March 11th 2019, with one chapter per day. We hope you enjoy!
> 
> Many, MANY thanks to NurseDarry for patiently and carefully beta'ing this fic. It has made a huge difference in quality, here! Thank you.
> 
> The title of this story comes from the song [Georgia, by Phoebe Bridgers,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VedZlnyChkI) which I listened to a LOT while writing this.
> 
>  **CONTENT WARNING:** This story contains one scene of explicit underage sex in Chapter One. In this scene, Steve is in his early twenties and Bucky is seventeen, and they are both enlisted men undergoing basic training at Camp LeHigh. Explicit consent is indicated within this scene. If you would prefer to skip this section, please stop reading at “Bucky had fucked a girl for the first time in 1941.” You may wish to resume reading at “But then Steve did a thing Bucky had not expected,” approximately ten paragraphs from the end of the chapter.

Like clockwork, Bucky would find another missed call on his phone. It never mattered how many prepaid, janky flip-phones he bought and destroyed, because every three weeks he’d get another call from the same number. He would watch his phone ring until it stopped; he’d wait a few more moments, and then there would be another notification: _(1) Voicemail._ Bucky would listen to Steve’s voice at least once, hear that low, serious entreaty for him to come back home, and delete the voicemail. On bad nights, he’d listen to the voicemail twice, but never three times. That would be a needlessly cruel indulgence on his part.

This was a deviation.

It had been only two and a half weeks since the last one. The night’s first phone call came through, startling Bucky in the middle of his four-hour workout, and there was no voicemail. Instead, the phone rang again. He hesitated, holding the phone in his hand. The plastic vibrated funnily against his metal arm, making an awful, tinny racket. His left hand tightened, the motion triggered by some half-formed impulse in his brain.

He frowned. He didn’t answer.

This time, he got a voicemail, and the phone didn’t ring again.

He finished his workout, spending two hours agonizing his way through pull-ups and a midnight run through the rundown industrial district he’d been squatting in for the past week. After his workout, he laid down on the camp cot he’d set up and stared at the blinking notification.

At the time, it had seemed like a good idea to avoid the voicemail. It didn’t suit the way he’d aggressively segregated Steve into three week increments. Now, though, staring at the blinking notification, he started to worry.

Decisively, Bucky flipped open the phone and played the message with a quick swipe of his thumb.

A robotic voice greeted him. _You have one new message. First new message:_

“Hey, Buck,” Steve’s tired voice said. He sounded like he hadn’t been sleeping — like the morning after being up on watch all night, camped out in a wintery French forest. Like air raid exhaustion, kept up by the artillery and the stink of collective fear.

“I… I know you wanted to be on your own for a while, pal,” Steve said. “I just... Something happened. Remember back at LeHigh? When you found out about Cap, and I showed you that picture of me all little? Me and ma?” Steve laughed, but it wasn’t a nice sound. “You remember what you asked me? You asked me if… If it was maybe gonna wear off. If I’d be big forever.”

Bucky did remember. He’d only just met Steve then, and he’d been so gold and handsome, clean and pressed into that green wool uniform, all big shoulders and trim waist. Bucky had been overwhelmed at the look of him, back then and now.

“You weren’t wrong, I guess.” Steve sighed, the gusty sound plasticky as it came through the phone’s cheap speaker. “But something happened. I don’t— I don’t know, Buck.”

The line stretched out, so silent Bucky started to think that Steve hadn’t hung up, and just let the line spill out until the voicemail had force-closed.

But then Steve spoke, voice so quiet Bucky could barely hear it. “I just wish you were here. Always made a little more sense to me with you around.”

And that was it. A robotic voice was asking him if he wanted to delete the voicemail.

He didn’t.

 

* * *

 

 

At three in the morning, he dug through his bag until he found the scrap of paper with Natasha’s number on it. It was written in code, but it was an easy enough cipher to unravel, given that the Red Room had taught them both the same things very well.

He tried to decide. Would it be better to send a text message, or to just make the phone call? Eventually, he just took the coward’s way out.

 _What’s wrong with Steve_ , he sent.

There was an immediate reply: _Something’s wrong with the serum_.

_What the hell does that mean._

This time, Natasha's answer came only after a noticeable delay.

_We don't know yet._

 

* * *

 

 

It took longer than he’d thought to make it to Steve’s place in Brooklyn, and still, by the time Bucky was staring at the doorbell, dawn breaking over his shoulders, he hadn’t figured out what to say.

Steve was apparently taking up residence in some sort of converted warehouse. Bucky didn’t recognize the building, but that didn’t mean much, given all the postwar construction that had gone up in Brooklyn around the time he’d been frozen and armless, awaiting total brainwashing and programming.

Finally, in some sort of a nervous snap, Bucky jammed his thumb onto the buzzer and held it for a few beats too long.

There was a prolonged pause, and the intercom spoke in a staticky approximation of Steve’s low, even voice. “What can I do for you?”

“Hey, Steve, it’s me,” he said.

Would Steve even be able to recognize his voice? He’d still been so young by the time he’d fallen, and seventy plus years of weaponization did things to a man’s voice and the way he spoke. The cadence of his voice was unpredictable now, sometimes rolling into a distinctly Russian growl before hammering itself out into something more nasally, American. Every once in a blue moon, Bucky dipped into unpredictable accents or understood languages he couldn’t recall learning at any point.

“Don’t leave,” Steve ordered. “I’ll be right there.”

After a beat, the sound of quickly approaching footsteps reached Bucky’s ears, and he shuffled in place on the sidewalk, speculatively eyeing the drab, run-down outside walls of the place. Brick was crumbling in some places, other places were tagged with graffiti, and the nearest alleyway smelled like vinegar, piss, and hot garbage. It certainly didn’t look like one of the Avengers lived here— it looked like any city street.

The shuffle of feet grew to a crescendo and stopped, then there was the jangle and scratch of locks being scraped open. Bucky felt his heart practically beating a hole in the back of his throat. His left hand made a fist, again, ticked off by some unrefined impulse in his hacked-up brain.

Steve swung open the door, but it wasn’t Steve, exactly.

The man in front of him wasn't twenty-something and golden, all youth and virility, the same man painted and photographed and transformed into the iconographic face of American perfection. It wasn’t Steve Rogers as Bucky knew him in 1943, and it wasn’t Steve Rogers as Bucky knew him in this new century, with a shorter haircut and a darker suit, all the more earnest and perfect for his time iced over. Unlike Bucky, Steve had risen from the ice more alive and god-like than ever.

It _was_ Steve standing in front of him, though, and Bucky could tell by the eyes, the shape of his jaw, the way his nose was a little crooked, and the exact shape of his lips. But the man in front of him— his hair was white, a few strands glinting golden still. His blue eyes were shadowed by the delicate linework of crow’s feet. His flat, narrow mouth looked even more stern than usual, now marked by new, faint lines around the corners of his lips. He was still broad across the chest and shoulders, ropes of muscle narrowing down to a firm, trim waist, but…

This was Steve Rogers, if Steve Rogers were in his fifties instead of permanently twentysomething, shiny and forever new.

“Steve…” Bucky was ashamed at how croaky his voice came out, practically flaky with the rust of misuse. He couldn’t figure out what else to say, so he stood there on Steve’s stoop, gaping at the strange man in front of him.

Maybe it was all in Bucky’s imagination, but Steve’s answering smile looked a little bitter. “Yeah, it’s me,” he said.

“It’s not going to kill you, right?” he asked, the question barked out of him like he practically wasn’t even in control of his own voice box. “You’re not just gonna keep getting older and older until you die?”

“Don’t know for sure, but Dr. Cho and Bruce don’t think so. Just… the Cosmic Cube got used somehow to screw something up with the serum. We don’t really know what’s going to happen. Like when I was first injected with it.” Steve gave a shrug, like this was no big fucking deal. “I gotta wait and see.”

Bucky was a little pissed off at Steve's cavalier attitude as Steve led him into his converted warehouse space. Some people just had converted lofts, but looking around, Bucky could see how Steve had taken a whole mill building and turned it into something else. It was a strange indulgence in a crowded city, but it was safe, no neighbors to poke in at you, or be reduced to so much collateral damage.

“Sorry, groundfloor’s just used for storage,” Steve said, walking over to the industrial metal staircase over against the right wall, not far from the door. “Keep meaning to get around to it, but it hasn't happened yet.”

Looking around, the bottom floor was sparse and dusty in an abandoned building kind of way, the multi-toned glass panes casting yellow stained squares of light on the concrete floor. The most tidy area was a patch of scrubbed concrete by the receiving door, where three motorcycles (in various stages of repair and disrepair) were hobbled on their kickstands. A plain-Jane sedan with government plates and discreet surveillance equipment and siren was parked at an angle.

“Not so bad,” Bucky said, thinking about squatting in bombed out buildings during missions with the Commandos.

The door to the upstairs living space was sealed with some sort of biometric scanner. Steve was quick to assure Bucky he'd be added into the system and get a key for the front door right away.

Bucky just nodded mutely, trailing along behind Steve with his still fists jammed into his pockets.

The upstairs was plain but well-renovated: tawny wood floors everywhere the eye could see. A darkened hallway, probably where the bedroom and bathroom were tucked away. And then just open living space, half of it dedicated to athletic equipment. A decent kitchen. A table, a couch. A coffee table, a TV mounted on a brick wall.

“So, what,” Bucky said, eyeing the sandbag hanging from a truss. “We just wait for you to look like a fucking octogenarian, then?”

“Buck, I don't know if it's like that. I mean. I'm still just as strong as before, really. Maybe a little slower. But still stronger than the average Joe.”

“Did you eat?” Bucky asked abruptly, no longer interested in hearing Steve talk about all the things they didn't know about his body, aging at impossible intervals.

Steve was silent for a long moment, and Bucky could see in the thin cut of his lips, the shape of his whitened brow, that he was weighing out his words. “I usually work out before breakfast,” he finally said, not looking at Bucky, but at his leather fingerless gloves tossed on the kitchen table next to a newspaper and a stack of mail. He talked slowly, like he was hesitant to finish talking. Like he wanted to tack on a few more words.

This was the most time they'd had, just the two of them, since 1945, and they were talking about breakfast and calisthenics.

“I'm starving,” Bucky said. “Go work out and I'll make something.” It was mostly true, anyway, and Bucky was unprepared to be here without something to do. He couldn't look at Steve like this; his entire brain felt overwhelmed with sensation and he could feel the gears grinding away in his arm. It was like all of him was a very slow moving wind-up toy, and he needed a little extra time to piece everything together.

He turned resolutely towards the plain kitchen and kept his back to Steve and his free weights and shiny-new workout equipment. He could feel a few moments of hesitation on Steve's part before he took off to the other side of the loft, puttering around noisily with his equipment. Bucky’s enhanced hearing made it impossible to miss what was happening behind him. He could hear Steve lifting over the sounds of bacon grease popping. The sound of the whisk cutting through pancake batter was no match for Steve’s quiet grunts and heavy breathing.

Bucky did not think about Steve in 1943, dripping with sweat, shirtless, running miles and miles of laps around the gravel track at Camp LeHigh. He did not think about the way Steve’s blond hair, longer then, shone in the sun and turned lighter the longer they trained out in the sunshine. He did not think about Steve in the barracks, dripping wet from the cold camp showers, white shorts gone practically transparent with water clinging to his ass, and the surprisingly dark hair at his groin, the swell of his cock against the fabric.

When it had been 1943, Bucky had been seventeen, and he hadn’t thought any further ahead than getting on a boat and sailing out to Europe to kill Nazis. He hadn’t thought for one minute about him or Steve getting old. He hadn’t imagined Steve’s hair gone white like this, his skin no longer sunkissed or perfectly smooth and elastic. He hadn’t thought beyond the next big adventure, then, because he’d been a kid.

When he started piecing his brain back together in this new century, his own body older— but only just so— he had figured they would never get to see that. They’d only magnified their chances for death, blown them up to astronomical proportions, and Steve still looked exactly like the man he’d been in 1943, perfect and golden, frozen in time. It was Bucky who looked older, damaged.

But now Steve was older than him, again, aged and yet…

“Food’s gonna be ready in ten,” Bucky called out, not turning his head over his shoulder.

There were a few more labored breaths, the clank of a weight being returned to its stand. He could hear Steve walking towards him. The fridge opened, closed. A bottle of something was cracked open.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Steve standing against the fridge, electrolyte drink a garish red in his hand. His posture was the same, with his feet naturally braced at parade rest, the corners of his shoulders sharp, and his chin up high.

He turned, unable to help it. “You still like yours sunny-side up, right?” he asked, holding up a carton of eggs.

Steve nodded. “Yeah, Buck,” he said, his voice lowered. “Thanks.”

“I remember a lot more now,” Bucky said, cracking a quartet of eggs into a large pan. “Not everything,” he clarified, watching the egg white go opaque as it cooked through. “But enough.”

Steve approached him then, and Bucky could feel him watching over his shoulder, radiating heat from his massive body as he stood behind Bucky, mere inches from his back. Even if Bucky had the thicker waist and legs, Steve was still broader across the chest, still slightly taller.

One of Steve’s massive paws caught him by the elbow, a caressing grip that anyone else would’ve considered too hard, but Bucky just found as comfortable as dropping an anchor into the ocean. “Thanks for making breakfast,” Steve said, before letting go just as easily and stepping away.

Bucky heard him set the table, and the two of them brought over the bacon and the pancakes, the unopened syrup from the cabinet, and they sat down across from each other. There was a slight pause while they looked at each other, a moment of silence to register the shock of sunlight falling through the mismatched, cloudy windows, rippling across the table, their faces. Steve’s eyes were soft blue, his smile a little crooked. His mouth had always been too thin, but Bucky loved the look of it.

“I’m glad you’re here, Buck,” Steve said, and the light from the windows was golden.

 

* * *

 

Bucky had fucked a girl for the first time in 1941, when he was fifteen, but the first time he was fucked was 1943, knees braced wide on the ground and hips bent over his Army cot. He learned that if he braced his arms just right, the joints in the cot didn’t creak, and it helped him keep his back arched just so.

Steve was always an anomaly of gentleness and careless firmness: he’d wreck Bucky when they trained together, but brush Bucky’s hair out of his eyes when it came loose across his forehead. He wasn’t afraid to be harsh with Bucky if he was fucking around or had a dumbass idea. But he was sweet as sugar when they were puttering around, tired as hell from all their drilling and running and endless endurance training.

They had been laying in their camp cots at Fort LeHigh, too tired and too hot to sleep after a long evening of trying to pitch tents out on the parade field for night of practice, and Steve had rolled over onto his side and just asked, plain as day, “Can I fuck you? You don’t gotta say yes.”

Bucky had been quiet at first, wondering if this was some kind of test, a last minute evaluation of his ability to be Captain America’s sidekick. Had Steve noticed how— how _overwhelmed_ Bucky got around him? How Bucky couldn’t help but respond to every touch, hang off of every word? How Bucky was maybe just a little bit sick inside with longing, an all encompassing want. He wanted to kiss Steve, curl up next to him at night, he wanted Steve’s every laugh to ring in his ears, he wanted to _be_ Steve, he wanted to be _with_ Steve.

The whey-faced Army psychiatrist had asked a battery of questions about his psyche and history when he’d been inducted, including one particular question— _Are you a homosexual?_ He’d said _no_ , of course, because going with another man hadn’t crossed his mind at that point. It was just Steve that made him think like this, act like this. It was probably obvious to anyone with half a set of eyes in their head, Steve included, and he’d been like that since they’d first met struggling through their first days at LeHigh.

But Steve just laid there, propped up on his arm, chest bare and a little hairy, waiting for a long, tense string of indecisive moments. Then Steve was saying— “Hey, pal forget I—”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, in a rush of air. “Let’s— let’s do that.” He sat up and put his feet on the ground beside his little cot. “Have you? Before?”

Steve sat up to mirror him. Shook his head. “Never. Have you?”

“Only been with girls,” Bucky said, not looking at Steve. He wondered at the _never_ , because Steve had never once talked about any girls.

Getting fucked wasn’t like anything he’d expected, mostly because he didn’t have any idea what to expect. Even just Steve’s thick fingers stung and burned a little, and the lube— provided in their little kits, along with some rubbers— was cold at first and squelched something awful. But Steve was also impossibly warm against his back, and his big hands swallowed up Bucky’s hips, holding him upright and steady. He could hear and feel Steve’s heavy breathing, could hear Steve mumbling to him, sweet murmurs: _there, there_ , like he was little and needed soothing. Bucky still had his shirt on, rolled up above his belly, and they both had their shorts tugged down to their knees, the cotton rubbing up against itself, making raspy _shush_ -ing noises.

At first, Bucky was only really half-hard, nervous even in the dim light of their tent. He could barely see the lumpy swell of his own flat pillow and rumpled linen, but he could feel Steve behind him— enormous, strong, quiet except for the lube and rubber, the slightly too-loud sound of their too-fast breath. Outside their tent, men were snoring away, stentorious and phlegmy and disgusting, all against a backdrop of crickets and peeper frogs. There was something hasty and strange about all this, but saying no would’ve been impossible.

It had been awkward, when Steve first stuck two fingers inside, wiggling them a little before putting in a third. It was cold and uncomfortable when Steve pulled his fingers away, leaving Bucky unplugged. Steve fumbled with the condom, leaving the cardboard packaging on the bed by Bucky’s elbow. “Don’t want to make a mess,” Steve murmured over the sound of rubber on skin, and Bucky waited, trying not to tighten up all over again.

The first push of Steve’s cock had been mostly slow but relentless, so overwhelming Bucky couldn’t help but collapse onto his elbow to bite his fist to keep from groaning out loud. Bucky only dragged his teeth away from his hand when it started to hurt more than getting fucked did. His mouth left behind a smear of spit and the red indents of his own teeth.

“You okay, kid?” Steve whispered. He fucked Bucky a little slower then, softer. One of Steve’s big hands came off his hips to push Bucky’s sweaty hair off his forehead. “It doesn’t hurt, does it?”

Steve’s fingers lingered on his scalp, scratching softly, and Bucky’s back arched, like a cat’s. Steve’s cock filled him even more deeply, startling him with a sharp ache of fullness that stole his breath.

The reply that Bucky managed was more of a gasp. Pleasure shuddered up his spine, winding up and around each vertebrae as it went. “S’good,” he murmured, and he found that he meant it.

Feeling that first little taste of how good it could be made the whole thing feel different. Each exhaled breath brought a new looseness to Bucky’s body; the rigid clench of his hole unfurling gradually as the fucking went on. He could sort of sink into Steve’s hold, perching himself on the edge of his cot but also letting Steve hold his weight a little. And Steve seemed to get into it, too. He kept one hand on Bucky’s hip, holding him in place, and a hand on Bucky’s belly, under his shirt. Steve’s massive hand was blisteringly hot, calloused to hell from guns and climbing and fighting, but gentle on his skin. Only guiding, not digging in or shoving.

“Jesus,” Steve wheezed when Bucky moved his hips a little, rocking back into the cradle of Steve’s pelvis. That was a new jolt of friction, placed deep inside of him, the pressing weight of Steve’s cock rubbing at something impossible to name. It sent fireworks lighting up behind Bucky’s eyes, a shower of sparklers.

Steve’s hand was away from his belly in an instant, snapping up to cover his mouth. Bucky hadn’t realized that he’d made noise, crying out like a girl. “Shh, kid, you gotta be quiet, huh. Don’t wanna get caught, do you?”

Abruptly, Bucky remembered that they were out in the middle of the parade field, the barely-tied flaps on their canvas tent the only thing between them and the other recruits.

Bucky shook his head. Steve’s hand was clamped down so hard he could only just move his head from side to side. Deep inside of him, Steve’s cock was unmoving, solid and thick. He clenched down, an involuntary little reflex of desire, and it left him feeling stuffed full but desperate. Every breath caused his sweaty shirt to chafe his nipples, newly sensitized. His whole body throbbed. His dick was hard now, sticking straight up, and he thought about stroking himself, but Bucky knew it’d just make him come.

Suddenly coming was all he could think about.

He reached up, practically clawing at Steve’s hand until it fell away from his mouth. “Please— I need—” was all he managed to whisper. He wanted that terrifying, deep feeling again, the one that was pressure and pleasure all in one.

“Yeah, I’ve got you, Buck,” Steve rumbled. He started moving again, this time in quick, rolling thrusts. Big hands hooked right back over Bucky’s hips to push and pull, and Bucky fell onto his forearms and elbows against his cot, and let himself sway with the power of Steve’s thrusts. Between his legs, his dick bobbed up and down in time with their fucking, the sticky wet head slapping up against his belly every time he sat back onto Steve's dick. There was a muffled slapping each time their thighs came together, their tugged-down shorts dampening the sound. His thighs, already sore from running and hours of combat training with Steve, burned all the more now.

Steve’s thrusts became fast and messy and it was impossible to measure or predict if Steve’s cock would glance off that sweet spot inside of him or not. Even the slightest nudge against that place inside of him was enough to feel that tight, desperate urge to come. But Bucky couldn’t chase that desire— he was a ragdoll in Steve’s hands, dragged over the girth of Steve’s cock again and again like a sleeve.

“Oh, honey,” Steve muttered. His face and big nose were mashed into the side of Bucky’s head. His breath came as blistering hot panting against Bucky’s sweaty scalp. “You feel so small inside, kid. _Jesus_.”

Inside of him, Steve’s cock felt bigger, the pressure harder and deeper. Bucky was yanked back further, Steve’s cock grinding in deeply and rubbing over that same spot. It made him frantic, too, squirming into the sensation, hungry for more. If he could just get a hand around himself—

Steve grunted and jammed himself so deeply inside, Bucky squeaked out a girly little cry before he could stop himself. Behind him Steve was shaking, his head collapsed against Bucky’s shoulder. And inside of him, Bucky felt the throb of Steve’s dick, a murmur of sensation muted by the condom.

The thought of Steve’s coming had Bucky spitting into his palm and his hand wrapped around his cock faster than he could even think it. He was already so hard, his whole body keyed up and sweaty, blood rocketing through his veins.

He came to the catch of Steve’s breath, to the sticky wet sensation of Steve’s cock going soft and slipping out of his hole, to the pressure of Steve’s hands on his waist, to the tremble of Steve’s thighs under his. The spill of it was tugged out from somewhere impossibly deep inside his guts, almost aching.

There was just enough light filtering into the gaps of the tent that he could see the puddle of his own come on the grass between his knees. He could see lube on Steve’s fingers at his belly. He felt winded and sore, but also a little floaty and numb, like the shock of so much sensation had forced his brain to short out.

In his fist, Bucky’s cock was getting soft, and he reflexively let go. His hand stung where he’d bit it earlier, and he swore softly.

The sound of Bucky’s voice seemed to break the strange sort of trance they’d been inhabiting. Steve sighed and Bucky felt it for what it was, a sort of undoing.

He let himself be pushed out of Steve’s lap, and they both struggled awkwardly to their feet. Bucky’s legs felt numb and cramped, and he winced at the pulling ache in his hole. It felt sticky and tired, the emptiness of it strange and cold, but he just pulled his shorts up over his ass and wiped his hands off on the front of them. He tried to ignore the weird sound the condom made when Steve shucked it, dirty and too loud. There was nowhere else to put it, so Steve tied it off and stuck it in a pocket along with the cardboard tube it came in.

For once in his life, Bucky genuinely couldn’t think of a thing to say. He hesitated, looking down at his cramped little cot with its sweaty sheets and flat, tiny pillow. It had been his view the whole time Steve was fucking him. He hadn't looked at Steve since they'd both gotten out of bed and knelt down in the grass.

The impulse took over, and Bucky turned around and found himself face to chest with Steve. The tip of his nose almost dragged up Steve's hairy sternum when he pushed his chin up and out to search out Steve's eyes.

It was too dark, and they were too close. Bucky could barely make out the whites of Steve's eyes. Steve was just black and white marble, a firm jaw, a sleek line of hair, broad shoulders, a sturdy chest. Bucky felt, very suddenly, his own smallness in the face of Steve's scientifically rendered, superhuman physique. Next to Steve, Bucky was nothing; practically a kid-sized little orphaned boy. Gun mulch waiting to happen.

Steve caught him around the waist, yanking him forward until he was leaning up against Steve’s chest, arms caught between them, palms resting uselessly against the muscled swell of Steve’s pecs. For one hysterical moment, Bucky looked at the hard line of Steve's jaw, and felt very afraid of the thing that they had just done.

But then Steve did a thing Bucky had not expected. He leaned down and, tentatively, pressed his hard, flat little mouth to Bucky’s. It was a slight kiss, chaste and sweet. Steve’s hands flexed on his waist, and Bucky shuddered at the way he felt, clinging to Steve, held up more by Steve than his own weak, wobbly legs. He felt, overwhelmingly, a sense of relief. Like an ache he hadn’t yet categorized was just soothed away.

The kiss was short, and Steve pulled away, only to press another kiss to Bucky’s temple. “I’ve never done that before, either,” Steve muttered so lowly that Bucky had to strain to hear him. Before Bucky could respond, Steve’s arms loosened a little. “Back to bed with you, kid.”

But all Steve did was pull Bucky into his bed, sprawling onto his back and arranging Bucky against his chest. “Go to sleep, honey,” Steve said.

“G’night, Cap,” Bucky murmured, trailing easily into an overheated sleep.

He probably wouldn’t have fallen asleep so easily that night if he’d known about the next two years of his life.

Bucky didn’t yet know that the next morning, the bugle would wake awaken him up back in his own bed, Steve alone in his. At breakfast, Bucky’s whole body would feel cold when he’d hear Steve bashfully compliment Agent Carter’s lipstick.

Nor did he yet know that he’d lose track of all the times Steve would fuck him, in tents across Europe, in basements, in the woods, in beleaguered European hotels on leave. He didn’t yet know how sick with jealousy he’d get when he’d see a pretty French resistance fighter kiss Steve in swirl of skirts and gauzy scarves.

He didn’t know about dying.

And he didn’t know about waking up again, body transformed from that of a whole, wiry nineteen year old into something monstrous, strange. Unrecognizable. He would look in the mirror and see a man ten years older than he’d ever remembered being. He would see a man with metal fused to his skeleton, a man with a haggard face, a man with dull eyes and shaggy hair.

He would wake up to Steve, exactly as he had ever been, only somehow brighter in this new century.


	2. Chapter Two

The white of Steve's hair— still thick— continued to surprise Bucky as he settled into Steve's home. The forcefulness, the power of Steve's perfect posture made it easy to forget that Steve had somehow aged.

Right up until, from the corner of his eye, Bucky would spot the white hair, or the faint evidence of wrinkles at the edges of a faded-denim gaze.

“Sorry it's not much of a room,” Steve apologized, showing Bucky to a guest room. And it wasn’t much, really, even by the standards of someone who had only really lived in the first half of the twentieth century. The floors were plain wood, the walls bare white. No curtains yet hung, and the bed was a plain blue square with a white pillow propped up against a dark wooden headboard. A bedside table with a generic looking lamp.

Truthfully, from what Bucky had seen from around an open door, the master bedroom next door wasn’t much more homey, or even any larger. The bed was perhaps grander, with a armful more pillows and a patterned quilt. There were blackout curtains open over a larger bay of windows and the walls had a couple of art prints hung in plain frames. There was a humanizing basket of laundry in one corner, and odds and ends scattered atop the dresser, but not much else.

“Nah,” Bucky said, looking around this even blander room before dropping his bag onto the bed. “This isn’t so bad. Been squatting a lot. Easier, but it isn’t always pretty.”

The room was small enough with the both of them in it that Bucky could practically feel it when Steve uncrossed his arms and drummed his fingers on the footboard of the bed. The wood had a solid ring to it. The bed had probably been expensive, the wood looked perfectly polished and varnished. “I didn’t want to do much in here,” Steve said, and Bucky figured it had cost Steve greatly not to comment about the squatting. “I figured if you ever moved in, you’d do what you pleased. You always did.” The last part sounded fond, almost.

Bucky caught himself thinking about that long line of phone calls, spaced out at three week intervals, and cut off that part of his brain. “Counting on me comin’ back?” he asked, keeping his voice deliberately light, and his eyes focused on sorting through his meager jumble of clothes, books, spare ammo, and protein bars.

“I hoped, I guess.” Steve’s voice was equally light. “You’ve always turned up sooner or later, kid.”

It had been a very, very long time since Steve had called Bucky by that nickname, the one that had just been for them. The sound of it made him shiver a little on the inside, in the place where his heart lived. It was a cold-seeming feeling, and Bucky wasn’t so sure he liked how it felt now, in this blank room. “Maybe I should get some sleep,” Bucky said. “I didn’t sleep last night.”

“Of course,” Steve agreed. “I’ll be here, if you need anything, Buck.”

After Steve had left, Bucky scooped up all of his clothes and threw them on the floor in the closet, and shut the door. They all had to be washed, and he didn’t care to see them anyway. The meal replacement bars and ammo went back into the bag, which went under the bed. He hadn’t taken it out, but there was a gun in there, too— just a small handgun, but he hadn’t wanted Steve to see it. His notebooks and paperbacks were carefully stacked up on the bedside table.

He sat down on the bed. It was a nice hard mattress, and he bent down to untie his boots with a grateful sigh. He left the boots sitting at the edge of the bed, waiting. He usually slept with his clothes on, but it was different now, with someone else out there to keep watch. It was easy to shed his jeans and socks, because they were stiff and a little too warm in the climate controlled building. The shirt wasn’t so easy to let go of. Bucky wasn’t proud of the grim, shiny knots of scar tissue that had seared his shoulder to the vibranium arm and the skin-zipper around whatever Frankenstein socket had replaced his armpit.

In the end, though, he stripped it off and climbed into bed in just his shorts, dragging the blankets up over his head until he was entirely tucked into the sheets. They smelled only faintly of detergent, which was a stupid thing to be disappointed about. The smell he most associated with Steve was sweat— sweat gathering damply in the underarms and collar of that costume, grease and gunpowder and dirt smeared into perspiring skin, the stink of a living, working body in Steve’s armpit when they slept curled together like puppies for warmth and comfort. The sort of stink they all bitched about as they tramped across Europe, couldn’t wait to wash off, but was nice, all the same.

If he curled onto his side with the blankets pulled over his head, it was a little like being curled up like that again. Bucky fell asleep quickly that way, and woke up a couple of hours later, stiflingly hot and sluggish in his cocoon of blankets. He took several long moments to unravel himself, shoving blankets down one layer at a time until he could properly sit himself up.

Rubbing his face, Bucky saw that clothes had been left out for him, piled neatly on the edge of the bedside table. He reached out and snagged them, the folds flopping in his grip so he could see the balled-up socks and rolled up underwear. The shirt was short-sleeved, and the sweatpants would probably be just a little too long on him. Under the clothes, he realized, was a fresh towel and washcloth.

He had to get dressed in his dirty clothes again to walk the few feet down the hall to the bathroom. Back in the Army, he’d gotten used to showering naked in a group of grungy, miserable GIs under the dribbling camp showers they were forced to set up. And as the Asset, his whole body was just one big biomechanical experiment, nudity among the least of his eroded dignity. The anxiety here was multifaceted. There was the hideous sight of his arm, of course, but also the awkwardness of being seen, uncovered, in Steve’s home. He was a guest, practically a ghost from the past, installed in the spare room.

Steve had seen him, naked and small, hundreds and hundreds of time between 1943 and 1945. That lithe little body had been folded into a pocket square and tucked away somewhere deep inside of this new machine form, and it was for that reason that he ducked into the bathroom without looking for Steve first.

There was a damp towel hanging from a rack, folded in half so there was a whole other length of rail for Bucky to hang his towel from. Both towels were the same shade of gray, the corners and hems a little soft from repeated washing, and he hung his towel up so it fell evenly with Steve’s.

He showered quickly but lingered under the water all the same. On the rare opportunities he had to take a longer shower, he liked to hold the vibranium arm up under the spray and watch the water dribble down through the plates, sliding this way and that as he rotated his arm. It wasn’t worth the hassle of trying to jam the edge of a washcloth between the plates, because the terrycloth just got stuck. The force of the spray alone was enough for most days.

The metal arm meant he had to be careful drying off, too. When he’d first been on his own, he’d learned how water would drip out of his arm for ages if he didn’t take his time. He’d figured out enough of a routine, shaking off his arm first before carefully rubbing the towel from side to side, all while slowly moving downward, that it was mindless, now.

He dressed quickly in Steve’s clothes— again, just the smell of laundry detergent when he dropped the shirt over his head— and avoided looking at how the short sleeves revealed his metal arm. He’d taken to wearing long sleeves and gloves to keep from drawing attention on the street. But it wasn’t like Steve didn’t know about the arm, what it could do, and what it meant. Maybe, he thought, smoothing the hem of the sleeve over the molded metal bicep, the metal was almost preferable. A reminder. A visual marker of all the calendar years they’d lost.

When he went back out to the open area of the apartment, he found Steve at the kitchen table, laptop open in front of him, and one big hand idly flicking through an open file. “Hey, Buck,” Steve said, looking up from his papers. Steve had cleaned up since his workout and breakfast. His white hair had been washed and combed neatly. It was slightly shorter than it had been in 1945. The thick meat of Steve’s thigh was clearly visible through his thin sweatpants, and Bucky didn’t let his gaze track over to the bulge between Steve’s legs. Instead, he let his eyes flicker over the way Steve’s shirts still stretched tightly at the biceps, muscles still impressively huge despite the other changes to his body.

“What’re you looking at?” Bucky asked, sliding into the seat next to Steve. For a moment, it was like being back in the Army, only back then, he’d have been bouncing off the canvas walls of a tent, leaning over Steve’s shoulder to peer at a map or mission briefing or coded messages. Now, Bucky just waited patiently while Steve nudged the folder towards him.

Steve sighed. “This is what Bruce and Dr. Cho put together about the serum.” And indeed, when Bucky looked at it, it was just dry scientific writing. None of it looked engaging or easy to read. Beside him, Steve rubbed at his eye for several long moments, the corners of his mouth pulled down. When Steve dropped his hand from his face, his blue eyes looked tired, the whites gone a little red. Between Steve’s lightened brows, there was a firm little furrow, a hard knot of tension. “The aging happened suddenly, and it appears to have stopped just as quickly as it started. I’m roughly fifty, but I still have most of my enhanced strength. It’s just like… all of the aging that maybe should’ve happened over time happened all at once.”

“Do they know what caused it?”

“Sam, Nat, and I were trying to recover a fragment of the Cosmic Cube from a Hydra facility in eastern Germany, five days ago. You’d been there for a while, apparently, back in the fifties.”

Bucky nodded. He’d might’ve been there as much as anywhere else, for all he remembered of the last seventy years or so. The specifics of his cryo-rest often eluded him, and it didn’t help that they’d carted him around from place to place as he slept.

“It was easy to get into the facility, security wasn’t much of a challenge. Now, I’m not so sure if that wasn’t on purpose. The fragment was maybe just a couple of inches long, not even an inch thick. It was just… suspended, glowing all blue. You know, like a forcefield. We just had to get through one more guy, and he had in in his bare hands, so when I grabbed it, I didn’t think anything of it.”

“So it happened right away?”

Steve sighed again, running a hand through his hair. It was too soft and fine, like it always had been, to stick straight up, and Steve had never much bothered with slicking his hair back. Instead, it just looked soft and rumpled, like the way a bed got mussed when you laid on top of the covers for a nap.

“No,” he said. “We had it packed up in a vibranium vial, and I put it in my pocket. Seemed like the safest thing, at the time.” Which made sense. God, what casual messes and carelessness they had embodied back in the war, all in the name of getting stuff done, all the little accidents that happened and came out of that. Nothing quite like this, though.

“Prolonged exposure, then,” Bucky mused, looking down at a long string of some chemical compound, a little formula in black and white that supposedly represented some of the more fantastical parts of Steve.

“Guess so. By the time we got back, I was starting to feel sick. Tired, like I was coming down with a cold. Vision started going blurry when I was typing up my mission report, started getting muscle cramps. Went to go see Dr. Cho, and within twelve hours…” Steve just shrugged.

His body, transformed, spoke for itself. Steve’s eyes still looked tired, but the furrow in his brow had softened some, and his face looked a little less harsh for it. The strong line of his jaw was still imposing though— a feature that’d probably never go away. That little physical detail had nothing to do with being young and impossibly strong. Instead, it was more a fundamental framework of self than anything else.

“And they’re still trying to figure out if it’s reversible or not,” Bucky surmised.

Truthfully, he wondered if it were even possible. They’d had seventy years to figure the serum out and no one had managed it yet. The bastard serum Bucky had been injected with had been proof of that. Dr. Banner was just another in a long line of serum lookalike fuck-ups. Bucky felt it very likely that Steve had been some kind of freak of nature to begin with. There was nothing more to it than that.

“And if it’s not? Reversible, I mean.”

As soon as he’d asked, Bucky felt the change in the air. Steve went still, the deadly kind of quiet that Bucky remembered came with the cowl, a muscular little tic in his jaw that’d be barely visible. If he were still seventeen or eighteen, he’d have felt abashed at putting that look on Steve’s face. But now he didn’t feel that same impulsive urge to swallow his words right back into his mouth. Instead, he just let them hover.

Steve slipped the file out from under Bucky’s inert hand, and snapped it shut. Bucky did not miss it when all those pages of medical gibberish disappeared from sight. “They’ll figure it out,” Steve said, a commander’s assurance in a structure beyond himself.

Bucky decided to let it go. “And how’s it feel? It's strange. You don't look that different, but you do.” He hesitated before finally saying, quietly, “It's been a long time.”

“It's fine enough,” Steve said. “It's like a cold. A little tired, a little sore.” For a few moments, there was just the little sounds of Steve putting all his papers and files back together, stacking everything up neatly. “What do you say about an early dinner? There's a deli down the block you’d like.”

“Yeah, let me just grab my stuff.”

They both stood, and Bucky turned to head back down the hall to the plain little guest room, but Steve snagged him by the hand. Bucky paused and turned, puzzling over the strange sensory input of Steve’s thick fingers between his metal ones. The pressure was gentle and almost too faint to feel, and it caused a shivery little twitch in his hand.

Bucky dragged his gaze up from their joined hands, looking up to Steve's face. They were only a couple of feet apart. Their hands sort of hung between their bodies.

“What about you, Buck?” Steve's voice was quiet and earnest. His eyes looked less sharp, like sky instead of stone. “How do you feel?”

There was an endless spiral of permutations to answer Steve's seemingly open ended question. And in a lot of ways, his answers changed by the week, the day, the moment, the infinity of sensations in a body not quite recognizable. But Bucky had been awake for a while now, and he'd had a lot of time to distill his problems down to a simple formula. “When I died, I was a kid, you know? And now I'm not.”

Steve’s hand tightened on his— or maybe it was just a neurological misfire of some kind, his brain unable to translate the closed loops between Steve, machine, and himself. If he were still a kid, he might’ve read this moment as a chance, or something. As it was, a part of his brain was imagining what it would feel like to kiss Steve again. To slip into the uncertain skin of his younger self and let it all happen.

Instead, he followed a tidier impulse. He squeezed Steve’s hand, pulled together a tight smile, and left Steve standing there to go grab his wallet.

 

* * *

 

The next week allowed them to fall into a general pattern. Bucky now slept at night and worked out in the mornings with Steve. They made breakfast together, and took their time drinking coffee and Gatorade in front of the wall of streaky, yellowed windows. Steve worked at his kitchen table— surrounded by SHIELD files and fielding calls— and Bucky went for long walks and scribbled in his notebook when he needed to sort through a memory. He had piles of books in his bag, and he’d dump them or trade them in or otherwise replace them as soon as he was finished with them— he saved very few of them. For his part, Steve had barely any books, which surprised Bucky.

Lunch wasn’t consumed at one sitting, so much as picked at throughout the day while they went about their paperwork. Steve would bring Bucky a handful of almonds, or rummage around in the fridge until he found a suitable pile of leftovers. Their mornings and afternoons reminded Bucky, pleasantly, of the days they spent between missions— PT and food, lazing about reading and doodling away while Steve contended with the particulars of their upcoming duties.

Of course, things were heightened now. Hydra was not the sole spectre that haunted them anymore, just one of many. Instead of comic books and little drawings, he read to catch up on everything he’d missed while he was under his programming, and wrote to piece together his memories instead of simply doodling out of boredom.

And despite the higher stakes, there was still that fundamental comfort of looking up to see Steve, illuminated by sun or darkened by shadow, leaning over his papers with a thoughtful frown on his face. It was a relief to practically hear the gears turning in Steve’s head, to listen to his little hums and the scratch of pencil on paper.

It was the late dinner hour where a strange stiltedness fluttered into their day. Should they eat in, or pick up takeout? Who would cook? What would they do after the remains and dishes had been cleared away, and darkness fell in through the windows? The hominess seemed to dissipate as day tipped to night, replacing it with the distinct awkwardness of being a guest in someone’s home.

The truth was that Steve had never been much of a conversationalist. He hadn’t improved much with age. But Bucky was no longer the blabbermouth sidekick, content to chatter along at Steve’s side, pleased with whatever he could coax out of the man. He was prone to long periods of quiet, or disquiet, these days. It was easier to read than try to talk to Steve about anything.

Sure, they talked a little. Steve talked a little about his past missions, working with Natasha and Sam more than anyone else. Bucky glossed over his life since escaping Hydra, skimping on the details of squatting and renting dumpy little efficiency apartments, always moving from place to place because nothing ever felt even close to right, or normal. Steve seemed more serious these days, and Bucky knew he did, too. They didn’t laugh like they used to.

They would sit quietly for a long time, and then they would go to bed, one at a time, drifting down the dimly lit hallway and into those plain, boring rooms. Bucky would stare up at the ceiling for long stretches of time and wonder if Steve was lying awake, too.

Everything Steve had done, from the day Bucky had met him to the day the kid James Barnes had died, had seemed miraculous. The new version of himself felt that way too, still. Maybe not so openly or loudly, but he felt it all the same. He still felt the same euphoric desire to be near to Steve, the same urge to sink down to his knees and lay his head in Steve’s lap, the belly-tightening hunger for sex and softness. It was the same sickness he’d felt at LeHigh, back before Steve lay with him for the first time, only now, he was better at hiding it.

 

* * *

 

“Helen, I don’t think I need to do that,” Steve said, pacing around the kitchen and talking into his cellphone. Steve was light on his feet, barely making a noise even on his hardwood floors, and so Bucky found it easy to eavesdrop without looking up from his book on urban renewal. He made a note of where he’d stopped reading but kept turning the pages anyway. “I haven’t noticed any changes since last week.”

The voice was too tinny, and Steve was just too far away, to properly make out Dr. Cho’s side of the argument. It didn’t take a genius to figure out Steve and Dr. Cho were not seeing eye-to-eye on the subject of Steve’s aging. After that first day, Steve’s file on himself and the failing serum had disappeared, and Bucky wasn’t able to get more out of Steve beyond being “fine” or “a little tired, Buck, nothin’ serious.”

But he hadn’t been stupid as a kid soldier in 1945, and Bucky Barnes wasn’t stupid in the here and now, either. He’d caught Steve rubbing at his eyes and temples, eyes bloodshot, and the delicate skin under them gone puffy and dark. And maybe they still worked out every morning, but Steve never tried doing anything that would require him to keep up with Bucky, and he wasn’t exactly deadlifting Panzers, either. Throughout the day, Steve would stretch his back and his arms, all while wearing a tight little grimace on his serious face. It reminded Bucky of how the arm made him feel, sometimes, encumbered by all the weight he had to carry around.

“We can postpone the stress test for now. I can come in this afternoon for the bloodwork, and we’ll set up another time for the rest of it.”

More silence. Bucky played with a corner of a page. It was thick paper stock, and it made a sharp little sound as it slid between two plates on his left index finger. If the hand were flesh and blood, he’d have a hell of a papercut.

“Seems a little much for me, that’s all I was thinking.”

“I’ll go in with you,” Bucky said, looking directly up at Steve for the first time since he’d answered his phone. “I’ll do some tests, too. Don’t tell me they aren’t asking for them.”

There was a long pause. Steve looked at him from across the room, phone pressed to his ear and that familiar hard line between his eyebrows. The afternoon light was mostly hazy and tired, and it sat on Steve’s shoulders in lazy streaks. “Give me a moment, Helen,” Steve said before lowering the phone to press it into his belly, covering the receiver. “Are you sure about this, Buck? You know I’m not going to make you go in.”

And Bucky did know that. Steve had never so much as hinted that Bucky needed to report to SHIELD and submit to round after round of evaluation, psychiatric or physical. Steve would let him live here forever without mentioning it, he was sure of it. That’s how Steve was.

But he was just as equally certain that such a thing would be impossible. He wasn’t going to camp out in Steve’s guest room, like an extended foray at the front lines, always waiting for something from the higher-ups. “Nah, it’s fine. Going to happen eventually, Steve. Tell her we’ll come in today.”

The look Steve gave him was searching, but in the end, Steve just lifted the phone back up to his ear and confirmed an appointment for that afternoon, for Steve Rogers and James Barnes.

Lunch was mostly skipped. They drank protein shakes and puttered around in Steve’s high-performance athletic wear. He even wore a pair of Steve’s sneakers in lieu of his boots. They were light mesh and had a thin, squishy sole, and his feet felt too light when they walked down to the lower floor of the warehouse where all the vehicles were kept.

“The Indian?” Bucky asked, hopefully, gesturing to the least banged-up looking bike. It had been one hell of a long time since he and Steve last shared a bike, hauling ass through Europe. Back then he’d been tiny, and had fit behind Steve’s bulk with ease.

Steve paused, looking at it speculatively. “You think we’d both fit?”

“Maybe not like we did when I was a buck-thirty, but we can make it work.” Bucky eyed Steve. “Whaddaya say, finally let me drive?”

Frowning, Steve swung the keys around his forefinger once, twice. He looked between Bucky and the bike. “Alright,” he conceded, holding out the keys. “Don’t make me regret this.”

Bucky just grinned and snagged a helmet.

They made it to the SHIELD facility in pretty short order, all things considered. New York traffic was always a nightmare, and having Steve’s thighs around his was a distraction all its own, but his reflexes were so deeply ingrained, Bucky didn’t need much concentration to weave in and out at slightly too-fast speeds. The vibrations of the bike, firm and irregular against his thighs, were a jolt to the system, as was the sickly city air as it gusted up his sleeves, buffeting his shirt against his skin and cutting right through the cotton of his sweatpants. Steve’s hands were hot where they rested on Bucky’s waist, and he felt each subtle grace note as they flexed with their turns and leans. He took a few recklessly fast turns, just to feel Steve’s chest brush against his back.

Steve pointed to a discreet parking garage and used a key card to get in. Around and around rows of cars they went until they hit another locked level, where there was a parking spot with Steve’s name on it.

“Commander Rogers, huh? Official promotion, I take it?”

Steve grinned wryly, shucking his helmet and leaving it on the seat next to Bucky’s. “Something like that. Doesn’t have quite the same ring as ‘Captain,’ though, does it? Makes me sound like an old man.”

“Commander, you were an old man in 1943.”

Bucky enjoyed the little smile on Steve’s face, the subtle little curl of it. It softened his whole face, from the sweet little crinkles at the corners of his eyes to a nearly imperceptible dimple in one cheek. This shared laughter, amusement and enjoyment and the day’s little adventure— this was one of the things Bucky had missed so greatly.

Dr. Cho’s lab was impossibly high, the elevator ticking up and up at incredible speeds. Dr. Cho’s floor had required yet another swipe of Steve’s key card and a code. They leaned against opposite walls of the empty elevator, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable distance. Bucky could feel Steve’s eyes on him, just as he was looking at Steve. The weight of Steve’s speculative gaze wasn’t heavy though; instead, it was a buzzing prickle under the skin. It lingered even after they exited the elevator and walked down a long, monochromatic hallway to the right lab.

Beyond the sealed doors of the lab, the relentless SHIELD monochrome gave way to softer blues, and an array of machinery and giant monitors where genetic models and streams of text moved faster than Bucky could read. All of the white coats, he noted, were women.

Bucky trailed after Steve, their sneakers making an awful racket on the freshly waxed floors as they moved deeper and deeper into the cavernous lab space. Under the suspicious eyes of a whole room full of sharp women in spotless lab attire, he felt like an ox in his tracksuit.

Steve led them right to a pair of women at a large monitor screen, both of them tapping away at their tablets while the images on the screen— cells, of some sort— moved around, zooming in and out at whiplash speeds. It took a moment for Bucky to realize the women were speaking Korean, and that he mostly understood. Half the reason he didn’t understand it all was due to the fact that that they seemed to be talking about elements of biology he’d never even dreamed of before.

When they were close enough, Bucky saw the tag at the corner of the screen: _Rogers, Steven G._ So it was Steve’s blood they were analyzing. Both of the women wore similarly pinched, focused expressions, eyes flitting quickly over the screen.

“Dr. Cho,” Steve said, greeting the woman in blue and white. “Dr. Park,” he said, nodding to the other woman. Dr. Cho had soft, dark hair swept away from her face in a bun, and her smile was polite when her gaze flickered over Bucky curiously. The other woman’s face was a little more reserved, which matched the plain grey attire she wore under her lab coat.

Steve put a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “This is James Barnes. He’s here to do the tests with me.”

“Bucky,” he corrected, when Dr. Cho held out her hand. She had dry, cool hands— they were impersonal doctor’s hands, but the grip was firm and sure, and she met his eyes without any trace of hesitation. Dr. Park’s grip was the same.

Dr. Cho tapped away on her tablet, and the slide of cells on the monitor disappeared, leaving a plain home screen with a logo for U-GIN Genetics. She turned back to them and went right into it. “Dr. Park and I will be conducting a battery of tests. I’m glad it’s the both of you today, partly because we need to establish a baseline for you, Mr. Barnes, but also so we can analyze both of your results simultaneously, and note any significant discrepancies between whatever versions of the serum each of you were dosed with.” She paused for a moment, her gaze flickering between the two of them. “We’ve looked at the data from the Hydra leak, but we can’t be sure that any previous examinations of you, Bucky, were conducted under... scientifically reasonable standards. So this will serve as a useful starting place for all of us.”

That was a fair enough point to make. Most of what Bucky recalled of his time with the Russians was fragmented. But no bunker they’d kept him in had been anything like this bright, quietly humming lab.

Dr. Cho looked at Dr. Park briefly before directing her attention back to them. “Would you mind if we conducted both exams in the same room?” she asked.

Steve looked at Bucky, and Bucky just shrugged. “Fine by me,” he said, feeling a little relieved.

“We’re going to head into exam room one, then” she said, gesturing towards a rounded hallway to their left.

The two were clearly very good at what they did. Bucky barely had any time to overthink and get nervous before Dr. Cho was getting him situated next to Steve on a lab table. “Go ahead and take off your sweatshirts,” she said, gloved fingers moving over a tray. “We’ll start with the bloodwork, and get that looked at while we move onto the physical exam and stress testing.”

They didn’t ask him to remove his shirt— yet— and he was glad for a few extra moments to keep the scarring under wraps. The hand and his forearm were visible, but he was used enough to that, and, in a detached way, he could note that the metal itself wasn’t so bad. It was the place where man and machine had been melted together that made him feel like a freak.

There was a quick, sterile swipe, and the familiar pressure of a needle being inserted. Instead of looking at Dr. Cho as she filled a series of pre-labeled vials, he looked over at Steve, who had turned his head to look back at him as Dr. Park performed the same task on Steve. There was maybe half a foot between their hands on the medical table, and he thought very seriously of reaching out with his metal arm to take Steve’s hand, but didn’t.

It didn’t take long; the doctors worked with practiced efficiency, all but silently communicating as they laid vials out. “Tests like this are usually done by the phlebotomists, but I thought it would be prudent to handle it myself. You and Commander Rogers are a priority, Mr. Barnes,” Dr. Cho assured them.

The vials were whisked away for testing, and he and Steve were plied with some sort of juice- and greens-based shake. “To keep you from passing out later,” Dr. Park informed them dryly. Bucky didn’t bother telling her that it would take more than a few vials of blood loss to keep him from completing a little PT. He reckoned she had figured that out on her own.

“S’ pretty good,” Steve said, and Bucky grinned at the surprise on Steve’s face.

The shake mostly ended up being some buttering up for a long series of questions Bucky didn’t always have answers for.

“I don’t— some of the memories are a little incomplete,” he admitted. “It’s been, what, almost two years? I don’t think I’m ever getting it all back.”

Dr. Cho was unbothered by the gaps, though. “Only what you know, Mr. Barnes,” she said, perched on the edge of her stool, fingers hovering over a thin keyboard.

He didn’t know anything about the serum. He knew very little about the programming or trigger words, other than it was comparable to what Nat had gone through. The metal arm he knew more about, mostly because he’d had quite a bit of time to trial-and-error his way through its maintenance. They didn’t linger too long over what he imagined were the limits of his physical strength, especially if they were going to do practical tests.

After that, he grimaced his way through a series of questions about his sex life: _How old were you when you became sexually active?_ Fifteen. _How many partners have you had?_ Uh, only four that he knows for sure. _Did you always use protection?_ Not really, it was either the forties or he was brainwashed and either way he hadn’t been too worried about condoms or VD.

Dr. Cho hesitated before asking one last question on the subject. “Do you,” she cleared her throat with a small, dry noise, “recall if you had receptive oral or anal sex?”

“What?” he asked, thrown for a loop. He’d never heard it asked that way before, but he supposed a doctor wasn’t going to ask him if he sucked cock or took it up the ass. “I mean. Sure.”

To her credit, Dr. Cho didn’t blink, just carried on tapping away. He deliberately did not look at Steve, who had already finished his much shorter questionnaire. They didn’t ask Steve about his sex life, presumably because the answers had already been filed away somewhere.

Bucky wondered at the answers, though. If his instincts that night at LeHigh had been correct. Had Steve been a virgin at twenty-five? And how many people had Steve been with since?

He’d probably never find out, and he wished he hadn’t thought about it at all.

It was really the only hiccup in an otherwise smooth series of questions. It was a lot kinder, in fact, than anything he’d been subjected to before. If a couple a questions about his dick had to be asked, well, he could scrounge up the equanimity to get through it.

The questions were a little more neutral after that, about his diet and general health, and they were easy to answer. He was always hungry and rarely felt even a little sick. No allergies, no surgeries before the war, and none that he knew the details of after he’d died. Bucky had broken more bones than he remembered, a count that had started when he was little, and lost track of around the time he lost his mind. Since breaking his programming, he’d been eating cheap and quick, until he went to live with Steve. Since then he got to enjoy the fruits of a proper kitchen and super-engineered protein powder.

“I believe that’s it for now,” Dr. Cho said, tucking the keyboard into a discreet drawer. “We’ll likely have some follow-up meetings after this, but I think we’re set for the moment.” She looked between the two of them and their empty plastic cups. “Are you both ready to move on to the physical exam?”

The four of them went on to yet another spotless, well-lit room, this one much larger, with a bank of windows looking out over the cityscape from a great height. Everything looked like breakers rising out of a hard, grey sea. Around the room, there were a few treadmills and some basic exercise equipment like weights and yoga mats. Beyond the view, the only thing to set this apart from a high-end gym would be the many-wheeled medical monitoring systems set up around the room, with cuffs and cords and electrodes.

It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that Bucky felt fear, or even apprehension, surveying the room from his spot by the door. Dr. Cho and Dr. Park didn’t resemble any of the cruel butchers that had hacked him to bits over the decades, nor did their quietly humming equipment evoke the same gut-wrenching dread as the decidedly less streamlined tools the Soviets had used on him.

Nor was this the same way he’d felt as a kid, examined and trained like so much horseflesh at the indelicate hands of the U.S. Army. Then he’d been confused and tired, and vaguely overwhelmed all at once.

No, this was simply fatigue.

They stripped down to their bare chests and running shorts while Dr. Cho and Dr. Park typed away at separate workstations, preparing the treadmills. It was a strange sort of unveiling, because they stood side by side at a countertop. Neither one of them moved quickly; they took their time undressing and folding their clothes.

When they were done, there was nothing left to do but look at each other, and Bucky felt the usual twitch of false-nerves in his metal hand. Steve’s gaze immediately dipped to the ugly place where metal and skin had been torturously fused together. There were terrible red welts there, scar tissue that looked more like barely-healed burns. The stretched and creased skin there would itch and flake off in strips if he didn’t rub oil into it after his shower. It was only natural that Steve’s attention would go there first. It was the most obvious part of him, now.

With Steve, there was no obvious place to look, no singular marker of his experience. With Steve, it had always been his whole being. The hair on his chest was honey-dark still, but threaded through with grey. His skin wasn’t so perfectly elastic anymore— there was a bit of softness and give that the sleek, marble version of himself had lacked. Under the skin, there was still seemingly the same dense muscle, but it wasn’t carved so starkly as before. His skin still had that faint honeyed sunlit glow, the same one that always inspired the urge to tuck his head under Steve’s chin and let himself be held.

“Y’look good, Buck,” Steve finally said. “Older.”

“We estimate Mr. Barnes’ body to be like that of a male between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-two. Like your body had previously been classified, Commander Rogers.”

“No matter what I do, you’re always gonna be old enough to boss me around, huh, Steve.”

Steve’s smile got a little bit of that masculine, smug shine back to it. It looked good still, even with the way the serum’s failure had aged Steve’s face. It took the youthful shine out his smugness, turned it to something almost roguish.

The testing wasn’t exhaustive, per se, but it wasn’t easy, either. He listened to the subtle beeps and whirrs of the monitors as he and Steve completed the same tasks, almost, but not quite, in tandem. The low sounds of their heartbeats jangled harshly out of beat with each other, and their feet pounded the treadmills at different speeds. Their ragged breathing stuttered through the air, and Bucky tried only to concentrate on the tasks set in front of him. It was easier said than done _not to_ measure the gaps and spaces between what he was doing and what Steve was doing.

For the first time in his life, he knew that he was unquestionably faster and stronger than Steve. He'd never even been close in the forties, and as the Winter Soldier they'd been almost fairly well matched. But this was something else all together.

Steve ran more slowly, and his mile count wasn't as high. He did less reps weightlifting. When Steve stretched in between facets of their test, Bucky could see the subtle markers of strain and stiffness in Steve’s slow, deliberate movements.

On Steve’s face, there was a look of obvious frustration. He couldn’t tell how much Dr. Park and Dr. Cho were aware of Steve’s mood. Given that they’d both been unflappably professional the whole time, he guessed they’d never say anything that wasn’t strictly clinical.

But Bucky had spent a whole lot of time cheating death at Steve’s side, and he’d learned, intimately, the faint traces of emotion that leaked out onto his stern face from time to time. This Steve was one that couldn’t quite keep up. He was scared, and being scared made him angry. And all that meant was that he was just as likely to do something rash as he was to stomp out and tuck himself away to sulk.

Steve had always hated his own vulnerabilities. Hated being wrong, or failing to spot a detail. Back in the war, it was always a matter of trying to have the best strategy, and that was something a guy could learn, or read up on, or research until he knew his idea was the surest they had.

But back in the war, he'd been the strongest guy on Earth. In matter of minutes, they’d taken some spindly little kid and turned him into a guy you could bet your money on. Now, just as quickly, that assurance had been taken away from him. And strength like they had— it wasn’t something you could earn. It was purely injected, something forced to fuse with the blood and boil inside of your body until every part of you was unrecognizable.

They finished their tests quietly, settling the weights back without any extra clamor. The whole process had taken about an hour, but they usually got in two or three hours of exercise in a day, and none of what they’d done had been that strenuous. The computers mostly just ticked away numbers and data, and all of that must’ve streamed to the tablets, because the two doctors had been studying Bucky, Steve, and whatever was on those tablets in equal measure.

Bucky’s own data mostly felt like vague nothingness to him, the sort of blur you’d see from beyond textured glass, meaningless, unfathomable shapes and colors. He didn’t really know what the doctors would glean from whatever they’d collected on him: they could calculate how much he could lift, surely, how long he might be able to hoist something without giving out. They could catalog his maximum speed, know exactly how much he weighed and get a whole list of facts and numbers, and chart every little metabolic factoid of his Hydra-manufactured body. It would probably be useful to these women. They seemed smart enough, and clearly had earned Steve’s respect. But Bucky didn’t really need it for himself. He knew exactly what he was capable of— he remembered more and more as time passed.

“There’s not really any surprises that I can see, Mr. Barnes,” Dr. Cho said, looking up from her tablet with a rare smile. It made her face look different. “But we’ll be analyzing the bloodwork now. If you’ll both be around for perhaps another hour or so, we can put together your reports.”

Bucky looked at Steve. “Yeah,” Steve said, stepping forward and putting a big hand on Bucky’s bare shoulder. “Mind if we use the room? We’ll spar in here for a bit, and someone can send for us when you’re all set.”

The doctors left, and then it was just the two of them. The computers had been shut down and tucked out of the way, and they’d cleaned up their exercise equipment as they went, though surely someone would be coming through to sanitize it again before day’s end.

Steve and Bucky circled each other in the middle of the room, where thin, spongy matting was laid out as a sort of makeshift sparring ring. It had probably been intended for yoga or something equally low impact, but it would do for now.

“What are we doing?” Bucky asked, already bending slightly at the knees. There was the slight frisson of electrical impulses shooting down his left arm, and he felt it twitch a little at the wrist. “Bare-knuckle boxing?”

Steve’s body, for all that it wasn’t the same, still dropped easily into form, standing a couple of feet away from Bucky. His knees were slightly bent. “Just practice. Like we used to.”

 _Like we used to_ seemed like an unfair statement, given that neither of them were in the same bodies. Steve had somehow degenerated into a yet-to-be-quantified less-than. Bucky was no longer the same lithe kid that could leap from Steve’s shoulders, or fight in the same squirrelly, quick way. The boyish sidekick was no more. He had been made to match the black of Steve’s shadow, instead of his right hand, and nothing about this— bare-knuckle boxing in the future— was the same as it used to be.

Back then, for instance, Bucky was always too impatient to wait Steve out— he’d always end up making the first move, going in for a quick jab and generally paying for it on the way back out. When he’d first been training with Steve… well, he ended up knocked flat on his ass so many times he could’ve worn a groove in the dirt.

This time, it was Steve who struck first, darting in with a slick little questioning jab, which Bucky quickly blocked. Steve grinned, but it wasn’t a pleased-looking grin. It was too hungry for that.

From there, they were off. They aimed for the slight space around each other’s bodies, their fists punching into the twitch of air where the other had _just_ been.

Steve moved with more intent than Bucky himself felt; he seemed more willing to throw his whole body into each movement, following through with his punches and moving relentlessly into Bucky’s space. The look on Steve’s face was now like a grimace, his frown deepening the longer they circled each other. Their rhythm was stilted, Bucky couldn’t bring himself to move with the same muscle-memory ease that Steve seemed to feel. He dodged and blocked more than anything else, unwilling to fight with that same steel-jawed, furnace-eyed passion.

In front of him, Steve was panting ever so slightly, shirtless and a little sweaty, his shorts riding high on his thighs. Bucky could see the throb of athletic tension as it ran through Steve’s body. A current ran through the muscles in his shoulders down his arms, but also down over his chest and into his belly, then dipping into the waistband of his shorts and down his pale legs to the tops of his bare feet.

“You’re faster than this,” Steve said, which was true. Bucky didn’t want to move quickly or punch with his left arm, or do anything beyond lightly spar with the person he loved best. This whole thing had felt vaguely superfluous to him. He’d submitted to the testing because it was simply a fact of life for an enhanced person like him, and at least SHIELD seemed more likely to use the information for good. But anything more than what he was doing now— pulling his punches, aiming wide, and tapping only lightly— seemed like the worst thing in the world.

Bucky drew back from Steve’s reach far enough to shake out his shoulders and crack his neck. “Don’t have anything to prove.”

“Guess you’re right,” Steve said, brushing his hair out of his eyes. Bucky watched the way the white hair stuck to Steve’s sweaty forehead, the flush rising up on Steve’s gorgeous skin. “Come on,” he said, beckoning Bucky forward.

They moved just as quickly this time, but now it was more about agility than strength. It was more enjoyable to just match Steve, to watch Steve in motion through the lenses of an endorphin rush and anticipation. The clinical, tense air of the whole room seemed to soften as they dodged and moved in and out of each other’s space. The longer it went on, the more sparring became like a conversation, the subtle nip of give and take between two people that, against all odds, still knew each other very well.

“Very impressive,” Dr. Cho said from the doorway. Her voice held the same well-moderated professional tone it had been all day, but it halted their workout just as abruptly as if she had stood in the middle of the room and yelled _stop!_ A couple of steps back, their arms fell to their heaving sides, and the tentative connection that had been brewing between them fizzled out.

“There are towels in the cupboards,” she commented, tilting her head towards the wall of plain cabinetry. “If you want to tidy yourselves before joining me in my office.”

Bucky dried off and yanked his hair back and watched from the corner of his eye while Steve methodically patted himself dry, combing his hair back away from his face with his thick fingers. They dressed again, not bothering with their sweatshirts but pulling their socks and sneakers back on.

Steve fussed with a couple of cabinets before finally locating what appeared to be a cooler built into the shelves. “Here,” he said, tossing a water bottle at Bucky’s head. “Let’s get moving.”

Dr. Cho’s office was at the very back of the lab, with a full bank of windows behind her desk and workspace. The room was rather minimalist, like the rest of the lab had been, but Bucky spotted a few personal touches: a couple of potted plants with a spill of geometric, frilled petals; a paperback tucked under a pile of folders; her cell phone had a sticker of Mjolnir on the back of its case.

“Mr. Barnes,” she said, folding her hands neatly on her desk. Her nails were short, but shiny. “Would you like Commander Rogers to wait outside while we go over your results?”

“No, thanks, ma’am,” he answered, shaking his head. “I’m fine.”

“Well,” she said, taking one of the folders from her desk and sliding it over to him. “This is an overview. Given what we already knew from the Hydra files, there weren’t really any surprises. Preliminary blood tests show that the version of the serum that you were injected with operated much like Steve’s did, though at a lower strength. If you’re interested, the folder will provide a more descriptive analysis, comparing your DNA and blood samples.”

Bucky nodded.

“These reports are a bit incomplete. We're going to have to do a little more digging in the Hydra files about your time in Russia to set up a more practical understanding of your cryo-sleep history and what that means for your muscle development. Which reminds me— if you're amenable, we'd like to conduct a sleep survey. Given your healing factor, it could prove useful to a variety of augmented individuals we care for.”

“I guess so,” Bucky answered, but he wasn't keen to sleep in a lab.

Steve must have read his hesitation, because he interrupted before Dr. Cho could go on. “Not yet, I don't think. Still getting settled in.”

“Of course,” she agreed, moving briskly on. The rest of the discussion was pretty straightforward. There were opportunities for further research, there were facts and figures compiled in Dr. Cho’s neatly arranged printout, there were no big surprises and everything seemed fine. “We’d like to perform these tests again within a few months,” she said, already filing his paperwork away. “But there’s no rush.”

Dr. Cho pulled another file in front of herself. “Mr. Barnes, would you mind waiting just outside the office? There’s some chairs just down the hall,” she said, her smile looking a little forced.

“He can stay,” Steve said, reaching over and putting a hand on Bucky’s knee just as Bucky had been about to get up. Steve’s hand was warm through his sweatpants, and Bucky let himself settle back against his seat. Steve didn’t take his hand away.

Pausing for a moment, Dr. Cho adjusted the folder in front of herself, pressed her lips together, and sighed. “If you’re certain,” she said, lightly, flicking the folder open and lifting up a multi-page report that was stapled together and passing it over to Steve. From Bucky’s angle, it was hard to tell for sure, but it was four or five pages long, with dense sections of text and a few diagrams thrown in for good measure.

“Commander Rogers,” she started, before pausing. Her face softened. “Steve, you’re not improving.”

Steve’s hand tightened on Bucky’s knee before loosening. “I know.”

“The best Dr. Banner and I have been able to work out is that something in the Cosmic Cube interfered with your serum, causing it to weaken by 38%, hence the aging, loss of muscle mass, and reduced healing factor.”

Things Steve had already told him. “Can I expect further weakening of the serum? What sort of— an aging process am I looking at?”

The hesitation was a physical sensation, a tightening of the air around them. Dr. Cho’s face looked poised on the brink of a frown, her brows drawn together and her lips stiff and cheeks frozen. “We don’t know yet.” Steve made a low, cut-off sound, and she kept talking. “We think the degeneration of the serum happened within that twenty-hour hour period, from first contact to when you arrived here at SHIELD. And now you’re on a plateau. A lower plateau, but a stable period nonetheless. Right now, our hypothesis is that you’ll age more quickly than you were before, but still slower than the average human. You still have above-average strength, healing, and your metabolism is still incredibly high. There’s every indication that you’ll stay healthy for a very long time.”

Bucky had watched Steve’s face while Dr. Cho talked. Back in the forties, Steve had always been kind of shit at maintaining his cool, but it looked like he’d managed a better mask these days. The aged softness of his face gave away some of his tension, but Steve looked and sounded remarkably in control when he asked, “And are we any closer to being able to reverse the cube’s effects?”

“Dr. Banner and I are conferring with a few colleagues, and we’ve sent everything we have to Princess Shuri for good measure. I’m sure Mr. Barnes’ data will also help significantly, but, Steve…” Dr. Cho said helplessly. “I know it’s only been a few weeks, but we haven’t gotten any closer to understanding why this has happened to you. And so we’re not any closer to figuring out how to reverse this, or even just recreate the original effects of the serum you received back in 1942.”

Bucky had read up enough— he’d seen Hydra’s files on him, on Bruce Banner, and a few other doomed test subjects— to know that whatever lost version of the serum that Steve had gotten was the only one that didn’t make you sick or lose your damn mind. Maybe it was something innate in Steve, or maybe it was some secret Erskine had taken to the grave, but whatever it was, it made the chances of getting Steve fixed all but impossible.

Steve swallowed, clearly processing, and Bucky watched the movement of his throat, and felt the way Steve’s grip on his knee tightened all at once until Steve withdrew his hand. The early evening light coming through Dr. Cho’s windows cast weird shadows over his face, and Bucky could see where the sweat had started to dry in Steve’s white hair over his ears and at his temples. He looked so tired, with the soft crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes, and the sad tightness of his narrow little mouth.

“So what does this mean about my ability to go into the field, then?”

Dr. Cho frowned. “We’re not really sure that’s in your best interest at the moment, Commander.”

Bucky could practically feel the disapproval radiating off Steve at that non-answer. “It’s not even a 40% loss of ability. We send agents out with some form of disability or injury all the time.”

“That’s the exception, not the rule. Steve, you’re a highly visible figure, and you’ve been put at a very serious disadvantage.” The way Dr. Cho stated her case was really something else, in Bucky’s opinion, mostly because she didn’t really budge, even when faced with Steve’s own personal brand of stubborn.

“Clint goes out, and he’s got 80% hearing loss.”

Dr. Cho gave Steve a look. “He’s also fitted with the best hearing aids in the world, and almost every single one of his missions is as a part of Team Delta with Natasha. They’ve worked together for more than a decade. Again, an exception, and not the rule. There’s no aid for a 40% loss of your strength and healing, Steve.”

“I’m still well above average,” Steve persisted. “And your tests even show muscle memory and agility is largely intact. Look, even if I’m not able to fulfill the same functions, I’m not without my uses in the field.”

The file folder closed in front of her, the report tucked away. “I know you’re right, Steve,” she began gently. “But all I can do is present the facts as they stand to Director Fury and Agent Hill. The decision is ultimately out of my hands.”

 

* * *

 

 

The ride home was quiet, with the city darkening into evening proper and street lights and headlights flickering into being all around them. The sun was quickly lost behind the concrete skyline, and Bucky held on to Steve’s waist as they drove home at slightly too-fast speeds. He leaned into each dipping turn, feeling the tightness of the muscles in Steve’s belly every time he dragged them around a corner.

Steve parked the motorcycle in the dark garage, and Bucky hopped off and waited a few feet away while Steve methodically killed the engine and tugged his gloves off. When Steve yanked his helmet off, his hair was a mess, dried funny with sweat, then mashed flat under the padded head protection.

Bucky could only follow as Steve led them up the stairs and back to the lofted living area, the creak of the stairs and the sound of their sneakers on metal was all the sound they made. When they unlocked the door and made their way inside, Steve immediately moved towards the hall, stripping off his sweatshirt and shirt in one go. “I’m going to shower,” he clipped out, not turning to look at Bucky as he spoke.

For a long moment, Bucky let himself study the still-defined musculature of Steve’s back. It no longer bulged in the same way he was used to, pulled drum-tight over Steve’s massive frame. It was still firm, and yet Bucky saw a new softness he liked. He wanted, desperately, to press his mouth to the soft skin over a shoulder blade, or to stroke down the tender curve of Steve’s spine, to learn the newly made give of Steve’s body.

He turned away before Steve could disappear into the bathroom, and set to locking them back in. Restless, he flicked through the pile of menus Steve kept on top of his fridge, and settled on ordering heaps of pasta from that Italian place.

Usually, Steve’s showers were pretty brisk— he was in and out of the bathroom in the morning in short order, like he was still a grunt making do with an icy European camp shower. Tonight, though, the fall of water seemed to drone on and on, and Bucky knew it was all due to Steve’s piss-poor mood.

When Steve finally shuffled out into the kitchen, fully dressed in a clean pair of sweatpants, his plain shirt sticking a little to his damp skin, Bucky had already tidied up the kitchen, emptying and filling the dishwasher and had shuffled the papers and books they’d left scattered across the table. “I ordered from Vecchio’s. Should be here in ten or fifteen,” he guessed, glancing at the microwave clock. “Gonna shower.”

The whole bathroom was fogged up when Bucky got in there, the windows and mirrors gone opaque with condensation. The fan was not running, so he was practically smothered by the humidity. He flicked on the fan with a sigh, noting the big streak across the mirror, exactly at eye level, where Steve would’ve dragged his hand across the dampness before the fog crept back across the glass.

Even with the extra time to scrub his hair right down to the roots, Bucky’s shower was still only half as long as Steve’s had been. He wrung his hair out until it was only mostly wet against his neck and shoulders, finger-combed and partly untangled, and made his way back into his room.

Steve was there waiting for him, laid back on Bucky’s bed and flipping through one of the paperbacks stacked on the bedside table, bare feet crossed at the ankles. It was strange inversion of the way Bucky used to always sprawl out on Steve’s blankets, waiting for the guy to come back from this meeting or that, and fill him in on the next mission.

“We could go,” Steve said, apropos of nothing.

Bucky chucked his dirty clothes into the hamper and hitched his towel up a little higher around his waist. “Go where? On vacation? Because I gotta tell you, I don’t have a real passport.”

“No,” Steve said, sitting up and absently placing the book back on the nightstand. The overhead light was a little too bright, and it made Steve’s eyes look pale. “I mean, we could go on missions together. Like the old days.”

Instead of looking at Steve, Bucky dug through the dresser and found a pair of sweatpants, not even bothering with underwear because he simply wanted to be covered up for this conversation. “Steve, I don’t think anybody at SHIELD is gonna go for that.” Still facing his dresser, he dropped his towel and yanked his sweatpants up his legs.

Steve scoffed. “Natasha’s one of SHIELD’s best agents, and she came from the same place you did.”

Bucky turned around, long sleeved shirt in hand. Steve was looking hard at him, and his cheeks had gone red, all worked up by the conversation, even though it had barely started. His hair was still a little damp, floppy and sleek all at once. To Bucky, he had never looked more like the Steve in 1942 had felt. “It’s never gonna be that simple. You wanna guess how many years she spent being deprogrammed before they trusted her?”

“Yeah, but they sent her out with Barton long before they trusted her. Bucky, you were born here, grew up here. You fought in the U.S. Army, for Christ’s sake. You have just as much right as me to be here.”

Bucky’s hair felt cold and a little slimy against his still-wet neck; water was soaking into the shoulders of his shirt. He crossed his arms and leaned back against the dresser. There was a tightness in the shoulder of his left arm, a mechanical stickiness. “Steve, I don’t want to do this if it means I have to let SHIELD poke around in my head. I’m done with that shit.”

“Let me handle Fury, Buck. I swear, it won’t be like that.”

The answering sigh felt like Bucky had to yank it out of the deepest parts of him, an exhalation that made him feel like a little kid trying not to cry. “I don’t know if that’s a promise you can make.”

Steve’s feet were the first thing he saw, too pale against the hardwood floor. His second toes stuck out just a little too far past his big toes, and it was all a little too absurd. Bucky had to look up at Steve's serious face, intense and earnest with his head ducked slightly to search out and meet Bucky's eyes. The blue of Steve’s eyes looked so clear and bright, like swimming pool water, strong enough to make his own eyes sting.

“I mean it, Buck. I won't let it be like that.” Steve's hands were heavy and light all at once, settling on his elbows and tugging a bit, jiggling him like you might shake a smile onto a pouting kid's face. “I'm a commander now, remember? What I say goes, pal.”

It was impossible to not believe Steve at that moment, so Bucky agreed.


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **CONTENT WARNING:** Please note that this chapter contains explicit, NSFW art. I mean, it's gorgeous, but definitely don't let your boss catch you looking at it.
> 
> This is the penultimate chapter! Thank you so much for the kind comments, shares, and kudos. It means a lot to us! We hope you enjoy the last half of this story. The fourth & final chapter will be up before I go into work Monday morning, EST.

Ten days later, Bucky Barnes had to sit at a big conference table next to Steve, with Director Fury and Agent Hill sat across from them. The pair of them looked very dour as they studied Bucky like they could read his file imprinted on his t-shirt.

“Commander Rogers here,” and Fury said Steve’s title with the faintest hint of disdain mixed with disbelief, which rankled as much as it amused Bucky, “seems to think you’re trustworthy, and that you’re no longer severely impaired by your time with Hydra. That, of course, remains to be seen, which is why we’re starting you out in the kiddie pool.”

Bucky just nodded. He felt a habitual impulse to answer _yes, sir_ , but just as easily dismissed the idea.

“Don’t think you’re off the hook, here, Rogers. Dr. Cho thinks I shouldn’t even let you out on softball missions, and Banner’s prevaricating, which means he agrees with her and doesn’t want to admit it. This,” he said, inclining his head minutely in Hill’s direction, and she wordlessly slid two identical folders across the table, “is an act of trust, and I expect to be rewarded for said trust. Are we clear, gentlemen?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, while Steve nodded, proper and sober. They both picked up their folders, but Bucky didn’t open his. Steve, on the other hand, picked up his folder and began reading.

Fury gave Bucky one last searing look before focusing the full weight of his gaze on Steve. “Commander Rogers,” he said, again putting mocking emphasis on the title, “I’ve heard all of your thoughts, comments, complaints, and demands on the subject of James Barnes, and I would like to remind you that he is _your_ responsibility, and here only at your repeated demands. Anything goes wrong, and it is on _your_ genetically-modified ass. SHIELD takes no responsibility for him when he’s out on the field. If he puts so much as a single hair follicle or vibranium plate out of line, you can deal with the sure-to-be enormous consequences on your own.”

Steve was utterly unperturbed, and he looked up unhurriedly from the dossier. Had Steve’s stern, unflappable face ever looked so natural as it did then, in that impersonal conference room? His narrow mouth was set but not angrily so; the faint lines that marked the corners of his eyes were lax. Steve’s confidence had taken new shape, the steel of him cold-forged instead of molten. Suddenly, Bucky understood exactly what was difference between _Captain America_ and _Commander Rogers._

“I know that,” Steve finally said, already looking down at the folder in his hands again, flipping to the second page with a lazy flick of his wrist. “But I trusted Bucky in 1942 when everyone thought he was just a kid, and I trust him even more now. He’s never given me a reason not to.”

 

* * *

 

 

In the end, it was simple.

A silent Quinjet. A knife and one gun, ammunition tucked into the pockets of his plain black uniform. Steve had his shield, shiny and well-kept, on a magnetic harness. Under his helmet, Bucky could barely tell that he had been aged, save for the grooves around his mouth.

The brief flight was mostly autopilot, and Steve sat in the pilot’s seat, bareheaded, turned sideways in his chair to face Bucky. He outlined the specifics of his plan clearly and concisely, with intel he’d gathered and organized while Bucky read science fiction on his couch.

Steve took point, and Bucky followed. They barely needed to speak; they were one body. Steve was the brain, the electrical impulse, the smooth motion of a directing arm and the twitch of a hand signal they’d learned seventy-odd years in the past. Bucky was the muscle, the jerk into motion, a command followed and the quiet breath timed to the shot of a rifle.

It was simple, like flowing water. Like 1942, but without the urge to speak and play the funny kid sidekick. Like 1942, but Steve was even more than he’d even been before.

 

* * *

 

 

After the mission they returned to Steve’s loft on the Indian motorcycle, Bucky leaning forward into Steve’s body as they accelerated and wove in and out of traffic. It was dark, now, close to midnight, and the roads were a little slick with the remnants of a dirty city rain that had fallen while they were still up in the air.

They had been mostly quiet since wrapping up the mission. They’d returned to the Quinjet, and in less than two hours, they were back in the city and dropping off the mid-tier Asgardian artifact they’d been sent to collect from a mostly-abandoned Hydra bunker. They turned it over to Agent Hill in her office, and Bucky wasn’t bothered by her somewhat cool, professional crispness. He felt muted in the aftermath of the mission, like the part of him that performed pleasantries or read for the joy of it had gone to sleep and would wake up much later. Agent Hill required none of that from him.

But now they were back in Steve’s apartment, and it felt like his skin was buzzing. Steve had gone on ahead into the open floor, turning on only a few lamps, so the light was just low, oily puddles spilling across Steve’s half-unlaced boots. Bucky stood just beyond the closed door and closed his eyes to the sight of Steve’s back in his uniform, of his helmet-mussed hair sticking up in thick white tufts, cast in narrow streaks of shadow and light.

When he opened his eyes again, Steve had turned around, and was looking right at him. He was slightly closer than he’d been before, and the light fell on him a little differently now. His square shoulders had gone soft, drooping like petals. The furrow of his brow had been mostly smoothed away, and the corners of his mouth had been unwinched. It looked like a frown, but it wasn’t. That was the thing about Steve: his softness looked like disapproval.

“Bucky?” he asked.

Instead of replying, Bucky took a deep breath. Raised both hands and pushed his hair back away from his face. Breathed out carefully until he was empty. He waited, but he wasn’t exactly sure what for.

Steve walked back to him, and like it was nothing, like he’d done it every day Bucky had been alive and awake in this new century, he gently combed his fingers through the long, uneven hair that framed Bucky’s face. He started at Bucky’s temple, where the skin was soft and thin, and it was easy for Bucky to feel the warmth in Steve’s hand. Steve’s fingers gently skirted behind his ear, then fluttered hesitantly down over the hair where it lay across Bucky’s pulse, and then Steve’s hand was gone.

“I’m going to shower,” Steve said. “Come to bed.”

Bucky followed more slowly, his feet unsticking from the hardwood only after Steve had wandered down the still-darkened hall. The bathroom door was cracked, and the shower was running, a soothing white noise vibration in the background of his mind that only intensified when he pushed the door open all the way.

At the bathroom counter, Steve was naked and leaner-looking, unwrapped from the intimidating bulk of his uniform. A bruise was swelling on one shoulder, hideously thick splotches of purple already drowning out the red pinpricks of burst capillaries. There was a thin cut across the back of Steve’s knuckles, not quite scabbed over yet.

None of this would disappear overnight now. These injuries— non-life threatening and not complicated enough to warrant more than an ice pack or a quick clean with soap and water— these would be there for however long they were in this bathroom, and they’d be there in bed, and they’d be there in the morning when Bucky woke up. They’d be there for at least a few days afterwards.

“It’s not so bad,” Steve said, voice a little low and gravelly. “I’ll be fine, pal.”

Bucky’s tongue felt stuck to the roof of his mouth. He wanted to say, _I don’t think so, Steve_ , and _How many bruises have you had that I’ve never had the chance to see before now?_ but he didn’t.

Instead, he closed the bathroom door, shutting them into this small, humid room. Steam was swirling up now, the mirror fogging slowly over Steve’s reflection. It was harder to breathe, and it was like getting slapped in the face, all over again, with how different things were. His kid-self would’ve simply walked up to an blond, unblemished Steve, and dropped right to his knees, or leaned up for a kiss, wrapping matching human arms— thinner, then— around Steve’s broad shoulders.

The men they had been had been stripped for parts and left wanting, and their— _their_ , the two of them, _together_ — entire framework had been dismantled. Right now, here in this shiny new bathroom, Bucky felt like some great mechanical toy, sticky and leaden at the joints. No neurons to fire, just bolts screwed in too tightly. Bucky didn’t know what to do, so he did what he usually did, which was wait for Steve to take the lead.

Steve didn’t make him wait long. There was an anxious moment when he reached up with one bulging arm to rub at the helmet-flattened hair at the back of his head. “You remember us fucking.”

It wasn’t a question, which Bucky appreciated. “Yeah,” he answered. “That came back pretty quick.” And it had, early on in his recovery, all sun-streaked flashes and hushed murmurs that coalesced into the remembered safety of being pressed facedown, under the safety of Steve’s heavy body, speared by his cock— or the feeling of kneeling between Steve’s legs, sucking frantically— or the way Steve’s tight grip felt as he jerked him off. The rest of it came back more slowly, how quiet they had to be, how Steve still flirted ineptly with girls on missions, how careful they were to never let anybody know. In the end, their shameful secret had died with them.

His smart response to Steve's statement got him a little smile, one of those sly little smirks that nobody ever believed they saw on Steve’s face. “I’ll bet.” Steve turned to face him more completely, his nude body paler than Bucky remembered. The hair on his body was still mostly honey-colored, and the hair at his groin was still dark. His cock wasn’t even half-hard, but it was flushed and dark, already so thick. Back then, the faintest suggestion was enough to get them both aching and hard. They would both shoot off like a couple of kids— not that he’d believed it back then, but they _had_ just been kids, desperate and horny and high on their own razor-thin successes.

What would it take now, to see Steve’s cock, hard and wet at the silky head, sticking straight up against the new-familiar cut of his belly? They were older now, their bodies different. Would it just be a couple of teasing passes down that thick vein, a single finger down his shaft to the heavy, furred sac beneath? Or would it take a couple of firm strokes, the joint of Bucky’s finger hooked right under the sensitive head? Maybe it would be easier to simply suck Steve’s still-soft length into his mouth, coax him to hardness with just a few pulls of his hungry mouth. Bucky felt his own body responding to his heated thoughts. There was the old flutter of nauseated wonderment in his belly, and his blood was thawing quickly now. He could feel his dick twitching as it fattened up under his clothes. He knelt down, unlaced his boots with sure, familiar jerks and shucked them off, leaving them in a pile in the corner of the bathroom. It was stupid to have not taken them off at the door. A waste of time, when he could be already in Steve’s arms. When he stood back up, Steve pulled him close and kissed him for the first time since they had died.

It was a hungry kiss, Steve’s tongue pressing into his open, waiting mouth and impatiently tasting him, sloppy and uncoordinated. Bucky put his arms around Steve’s waist, both hands spasming helplessly against the narrow dip of Steve’s back. And if Steve body against his wasn’t enough of a bulwark, Steve’s hand on his face, gripping slightly too hard as he steered the movement of their kiss, was.

Steve’s other hand dropped down to the buttons on his tac pants, and Bucky could feel them drooping as buttons were yanked open, dragged down. Then Steve’s hand was underneath Bucky’s waistband, palming an ass cheek and squeezing, dragging their groins even more tightly together. Steve’s cock was hard against his at the open mouth of his fly, and he jerked into the tease of sensation, his underwear rough against the sensitive head of his cock.

The only thing holding him upright, it seemed, was Steve’s grip on either side of his chin, thumb and forefinger digging into the softest part of his cheeks above his mouth. Bucky didn’t have to tip his head back the same way he used to— he’d grown enough inches to simply let his head loll a little and let Steve kiss him until he was no longer breathing in anything but Steve’s air.

“Turn around,” Steve growled, and like that, Bucky was facing the bathroom counter, hips pinned to it by Steve’s insistent mass. Bucky didn't care, he was too busy being aware of every inch of skin that was pressing into his bare ass, pants getting dragged down his body in rough jerks. They got stuck halfway down where an empty holster was strapped tightly to one thigh. They both worked with frantic fingers to undo it, and then his pants were down by his feet, kicked blindly off.

Bucky splayed his hands out on the countertop for balance. His neck felt loose, and his head hung heavily down— he could see the wet, red head of his cock just above the cold counter. He was dizzy, breathing hard, when he felt Steve pry open his cheeks, exposing him to the hot air.

“Jesus, Buck,” Steve said, and his reverent voice was warm and sweet, soothing the awkward sting of his own blatant visibility.

There was the sound of Steve spitting, then hot wetness landing on his skin. Steve’s cock was immediately there, rubbing through the makeshift lube, smearing spit up and down his crack, over his hole. “You aren’t gonna fuck me like that, you know,” Bucky managed to say, looking up at Steve’s reflection in the mirror. “I know you got lube in here.”

Steve’s laughter wasn’t much of a sound, just a gust of hot air on his neck. “Just gettin’ you a little wet,” he said. A drawer was yanked open, the corner catching Bucky’s hip before he jerked out the way. There was the familiar arrangement of Steve’s stuff: a comb (which Bucky had used), face cream (which Bucky had not), a few other odds and ends— and far in the back, shoved away to make it unobtrusive, was a little plastic tub of Vaseline, maybe a little less than half-gone. He’d known it was there the whole time, but this was the first time he thought about it being used. Because what else does a guy use that much Vaseline for? Jerking off. _Fucking_ , maybe.

“That’s the best stuff you’ve got, Commander?” Bucky asked.

“In here it is,” Steve replied, unscrewing the lid somewhere behind Bucky’s shoulder. “Old times’ sake, Buck.”

Bucky considered the worse things they’d used as idiot kids on the front lines. “Fair enough.”

Maybe it was just that his skin was superheated, but the first touch of Vaseline-covered fingers against the tight pucker of his hole felt shivery-cold. It was just a daubing pass at first, a feather-light circular motion that was more grease than skin, and the softness of it all was almost uncomfortable. Steve was careful, methodical, silent, as the lube was traced into his skin.

There was a pause where Steve’s hand went away. The skitter of a plastic tub on marble. Pressure, and then a burst of sensation as two fingers were forced inwards in a quick, shallow thrust. They didn’t really pull back, only wiggled slightly. Testing the give of this new body.

Bucky sighed at the feeling of his body adjusting, that first involuntary tightening, and then the way he had to breathe out from a place deep inside his belly and let go. He felt strangely virginal, now, bemused by his body’s own forgetfulness. Steve moved gently but didn’t waste any time pushing his fingers in all the way. The fullness of it, even just now, at the beginning of everything, made Bucky feel breathless.

Steve showed uncharacteristic patience as he slowly fucked his fingers in and out of Bucky’s body, thick smears of lube now warm inside of him and on Steve’s fingers. Bucky was sweaty under his one-armed tac jacket, and there was a part of him that wanted to peel it off, but he was held immobile, trapped by the hypnotically slow way his hole was slowly massaged open so he could feel his body’s involuntary grasping around the thick intrusion. The most Bucky could do was gently flex and bear down into the motion of Steve’s fingers, while his right hand left damp smears on Steve’s bathroom countertop.

“Christ,” Steve sighed, the easy, languorous thrusts of his fingers pistoning more quickly now, “fuck...” There was a pause, then a howl of sensation that tore up Bucky’s spine as Steve suddenly rubbed over his prostate with devastating surety. He was so surprised that he let out a soft little groan of pleasure, not caring to bite his lip to stifle the sounds. Here and now, he didn’t have to be quiet, and he jerked backwards, hungrily, into the sensation.

One of Steve’s hands moved, landing on the muscle between neck and metal shoulder. His massive paw squeezed Bucky, and the pressure pinned him in place. Bucky’s metal fingertips plinked spastically on the counter, neurons and mechanical electricity firing and misreading the wealth of desire rocketing through him at how wonderfully _small_ he felt, pinned by Steve.

Steve slowly drew his fingers out, slowly, and Bucky mindlessly tilted his hips back, mindlessly, to chase them. When they were gone, he had to swallow against the pervasive cold, empty feeling that writhed in his belly.

The Vaseline made thick, syrupy noises when Steve reached for more, then Steve’s hand disappeared from his line of sight. There was the too-wet sound of Vaseline again, this time with no accompanying touch. Bucky could close his eyes and fill in the gaps, imagining Steve working a fistful of lube over his cock until the whole thick thing was wet, the fat red tip peeking further out of his fist with every ruthless downstroke.

He could feel the shift of Steve’s thighs against the hard-muscled backs of his own. In response, Bucky held himself breathlessly still. Relaxed. Waiting.

“Can I?” Steve gritted out, even as the head of his cock was pressed there, against his hole. “I need— _fuck_. I need you.”

Bucky’s sweaty fingertips skidded. “Yeah, yeah,” he breathed out.

The work was all in Steve’s hands, and he wasted no time. The first thrust in was just slow and shallow, not even half of what Bucky was expecting, an incomplete motion. Another withdrawal that left him sucking in lungful of wet air and then…

Steve was sheathed inside of him in one sharp motion. It was jarring, to feel his whole body rearranging itself so intimately around Steve after all this time. His body was drawing Steve’s cock in deeply, beckoning it into the tight-packed core of him. A home for Steve inside of his body that had been sealed shut these past decades was now cracking wide open inside of his chest, a cascade of emotion waterfalling down every part of him.

At first, the only thing Bucky could hear was his heartbeat throbbing in his ears. Then he became aware of the sound of his own breathing, the way his panting echoed in the deep basin of the sink. Against his ear, Steve’s breath was irregular, harsh and frantic, a wash of warmth that tickled the shell of his ear.

There was one last hard sob— was it his own? Steve’s?— and then Steve was lifting up, gone from his back, and he could breathe in, a strong, clean inhale of air.

“You alright, kid?” Steve asked, dragging out on a long, slow pull, the head of his cock tugging at the taut muscle of Bucky’s rim.

God, he felt stretched wide open, held there on the thick head of Steve’s cock. The waiting was painful, the emptiness deeper inside, coupled with heady fullness of bearing down and tightening on Steve’s cock, trying to draw it back. Bucky’s metal fingers scraped on the marble as he adjusted his stance. “Yeah, Steve,” he mumbled. “S’good.”

Bucky couldn’t press back to take more of Steve in. He allowed himself the pleasure of waiting, of letting Steve direct the sway and motion of his body. He let Steve fuck him up on down the long, thick length of his cock, never pulling out completely, but never grinding in deeply. Just long, slow, deliberate pulls. A savoring.

“Oh, Christ, honey,” Steve swore. “That’s it, so perfect,” he said, but Bucky wasn’t doing anything. It was all Steve working Bucky’s body in maddeningly slow little pushes and pulls. The friction was ceaseless, deliberate. It was seemingly never-ending, fanning the flames without adding fuel to the fire, and Bucky was waiting to burn up from the inside out. Steve’s cock tapped irregularly against his prostate, little glancing bursts of pleasure. The fat girth tugged relentlessly on Bucky’s hole each time Steve pushed him forward. It plugged him right up each time Steve pulled him back.

 

 

 

It was easy to lose time like that. To slip off his mechanical stiffness and let his body be persuaded by Steve’s warm hands. Like this, Bucky wasn’t quite so impossibly far from his kid-self, the one that loved Steve with silent, devoted desperation, the version of himself that Steve fucked and slept next to at night, the Bucky that had been Steve’s little shadow all through Europe.

This— this was mindless pleasure, every part of him subsumed under the welcome pressure.

Steve was jerking him back and forth more quickly now, yanking Bucky back onto his dick. It was rougher now too, and Bucky felt his own cock slapping up against his belly. He reached down with his right hand and grabbed at himself, fingers nudging up against his sac where it was riding high and tight, the heel of his hand grinding into the sensitive head of his cock. What would it take? A couple of strokes, and he’d probably be coming all over Steve’s countertop.

There was a hard thrust, jarring his hips forward and making Bucky rock onto the balls of his feet. The breath was punched out of his chest, and he cried out, meeting his own wrecked gaze in the mirror. His face was flushed, damp at the hollow of his throat and under the hair sticking to his temples. His mouth was so red it hurt to even look at. He could see places where he’d bitten into his own lips. His eyes were black, even in the blinding vanity lighting.

Bucky had never seen himself getting fucked at seventeen or eighteen or nineteen, but he didn’t hate the fucked-out man looking back at him. Boxy hands swallowed up his hips, pinching him into something smaller. He was bent in half, safe under the broad shouldered shadow Steve threw. Over the ruin of his left shoulder, Bucky could see Steve’s face, the lines and creases pulled tight with pleasure, sweat trickling down from his white hairline. He was still bigger, still impossibly strong. Still made Bucky feel that tender bite of insecure childishness. He made all the soft parts of Bucky feel sore with want, tender and angry— a bite mark on a thigh, traced again and again with trembling fingers until it chafed. Steve was solid and sure, fucking Bucky on his cock like he had been born to it.

Bucky realized, belatedly, that Steve had been staring at him in the mirror, locked onto his face. Their gazes met in the glass, like flint on tinder, sparking.

“Oh, honey,” Steve whispered, the sound seeming gutted out of him with a hook. “I’m gonna come.”

The idea sent a shudder through him. “Yeah, please,” Bucky managed to whisper, words blurring into their loud panting, the still buzzing throb of the shower behind them.

Steve only gave a few more pounding thrusts, and then it was that burning hot splash of come, pressed hard into the deepest part of him. He instinctively clenched down hard around Steve’s cock, wanting to hold it inside, milking Steve through the last few trembling spasms.

He was barely breathing by the time Steve’s shaky hands were moving, one pressed to Bucky’s sternum, pulling him upright, the other dipping down to dislodge Bucky’s hand from where it was cupping his cock. Steve hummed in Bucky’s ear, a low groaning sound. “Here, kid. Let me,” he murmured. His hand was so big, still messy with Vaseline, and he sealed it up, vise-tight, over the head of Bucky’s dick where it was all leaking and wet. “Show me,” Steve commanded.

There was an answering flare of shy arousal at Steve’s words, burning white hot, and Bucky gave one helpless jerk forward, pushing his cock timidly into Steve’s grip.

“Oh, come on, kid. You can do better than that. Show me how you can come. Wanna see it.”

Steve pulled his hips back, and his softening cock slipped right out. Wet come dribbled out of Bucky’s hole, hot and viscous, and he clenched down around the sensation. It felt like he was on fire, lightheaded with arousal, and he struggled out of his thick combat vest and undershirt as best he could without dislodging his dick from Steve’s hand. The accidental friction was so good that when he finally dropped the last of his clothes to the floor, Bucky had couldn’t stop himself from the immediate pleasure he got from rabbiting his hips forward in tiny, inelegant thrusts.

“That’s it, honey,” Steve praised. His lubed-up fist tightened up incrementally around Bucky’s dick. The pressure was unreal, the ridges of Steve’s curled fingers like a constant caress.

Bucky moaned, and the sound was high-pitched. A whine. A wordless plea for more. He squeezed his eyes shut, simply feeling. He fell mindlessly into a pattern of slow, dragging thrusts, working his cock, again and again, into Steve’s hand.

Steve was plastered up against his back. The hand not vise-gripped around his cock was stroking up and down his chest. It was sticky and wet, too, humid against the base of his throat, down the hard line of his sternum. Steve’s hand dragged through the dark hair on his pecs, over the tight buds of his nipples— pinching and pulling and rolling them between massive fingers. With his eyes closed, each scrape of a nail, each dragged out brush of a calloused finger, was magnified.

“Open your eyes, kid,” Steve said, even his whispers carrying the full weight of a command. “Let me see you.”

When he opened his eyes, he was looking at himself. Steve’s chin was hooked over the scars on his shoulder, his face fixed on Bucky’s in the mirror. Steve’s eyes had gone glossy night-dark, and his razor-sharp mouth was red. The only other parts of Steve that were visible were his big shoulders, his thick, muscular arms wrapped around Bucky’s body.

It was Bucky who was on display. His skin was flushed from the belly up, his whole face reddened with desperate want. His nipples were all stiff and bright red, and his full pecs were littered with little pink welts. The ropey muscles in his belly undulated. The tip of his cock was shiny, blisteringly red as it poked through the curl of Steve’s fist.

Steve practically growled in his ear, and Bucky shuddered out a sigh in reply. Even seventy years later, he still sounded like a kid when he was getting off.

“Fuck,” Steve gritted out. His thumb massaged the head of Bucky’s cock, where it was pounding with sensation. It was almost too much; his core tightened, his balls jerking hard and tight. It wouldn’t take much for him to come. His hips sped up. He didn’t want to drag this out. “Christ almighty, look at you,” Steve murmured. “You were even tighter than I remembered, you know that, kid?”

Steve’s cock, mostly soft, but still big, was right up against his ass, where he was still sloppy wet. Bucky trembled to think at how he had felt, stretched open on Steve’s cock, filled up so well it felt like he was going to split open and burst with pleasure. “So sweet,” Steve breathed, warm breath shivering over Bucky’s neck. The tip of his nose was nudging the sensitized shell of Bucky’s ear.

Bucky was panting in earnest now, his thrusts a little jerky with desperation. Everything was centered on the tight hole of Steve’s fist, the relentless pressure that enveloped him. He was rapidly spiralling upwards, seeking _more._

“God, Buck,” Steve said. His voice was loud, snapping through Bucky’s head, focusing him as he chased release. “You look so good, kid. So fuckin’ sweet for me. Never stopped wantin’ you like this, Jesus, you’re so fuckin’—”

Whatever Steve was going to say was distorted into white noise as Bucky fucked forward once, twice, burying his cock in Steve’s fist to the root, and then he was coming in long, almost painfully thick spurts. He couldn’t help but hump Steve’s fist for those last few moments of pleasure, watching through heavy eyes as his come spilled over Steve’s hand, dribbling sloppily down onto the counter in long white ropes. It seemed to go on forever, pleasure and pressure anchoring him to just the mindless bliss of orgasm right there in Steve’s arms.

He came back to himself to the sound of their breath, harsh and heavy. It was too hot in the bathroom now, the steam from the shower clouding their reflections into beige shapes and the brown of Bucky’s hair. Steve was a welcome heaviness along his back. He had let go of Bucky’s cock, and his hand was laid palm up on the countertop, full of come.

Steve’s other hand nudged gently at his chin. When they kissed, it was gentle, sated and calm.

Comfortable, like decades and millions of transgressions hadn’t passed since they were last together like this.

“Come on,” Steve said, his mouth now warm and wet against Bucky’s hot cheek. “Let’s get in the shower.”

They made it into the shower without making too much of a mess, careful with Steve’s sticky fingers and the come and lube running down Bucky’s ass to his thighs. The water wasn’t too hot, just comfortably warm, and they rinsed off perfunctorily at first, cleaning away lube and come until their fingers were clean enough to bother with soap.

Bucky kept his breathing purposefully slow while they stood face-to-face for Steve to shampoo his hair. “It’s so long, now,” Steve muttered, squeezing another dollop of shampoo onto Bucky’s scalp. “None of the guys had hair like this back then, but it suits you,” he said, scratching through the hair at the nape of Bucky’s neck one last time before tilting Bucky’s head back under the spray.

Steve’s hands combed through his hair, again and again, until it was silky and clean, clinging to Bucky’s neck and Steve’s hands with every heavy-handed drag of Steve’s fingers. It was tender and all too brief. Bucky’s throat felt tight when Steve’s hands fell away from his hair.

It took even less time to wash Steve’s hair, short as it was. Bucky drew it out by finger combing the front up and away from his eyes in a facsimile of the way he’d worn it in the forties, when it was longer on top.

Bucky spent time cleaning the cuts on Steve’s knuckles, and Steve dribbled soap all long Bucky’s back before rubbing it over his skin with his bare hands, dipping lower over the base of his spine until it was just Steve’s soapy fingers, toying with the wet mess between Bucky’s legs, carefully rinsing him clean.

They were lucky the shower was so large, or they might’ve tripped a hundred times trying to maneuver around each other. They lingered needlessly, touching the whole time, until there was nothing left to wash away. It was the longest Bucky could ever remember showering, and he felt warmed-through and waterlogged.

“Here,” Steve said, finally twisting the knob off. The water stopped and everything went cold. “Let’s get ready for bed.”

They dried off fast and sloppy. Steve wiped come and Vaseline from the countertops while Bucky rubbed a towel through his hair. They brushed their teeth side by side and hung their damp towels up to dry and walked naked down the hall to Steve’s room.

They didn’t even turn on the lights. The room was dark, but Bucky could see well enough to yank down the covers and climb into the bed.

This bed— unlike the one he’d slept in since the day he got here— smelled like Steve. It was the deodorant he wore, mild soap, and generic fabric softener. It was a little sweat and whatever unnameable thing was just Steve.

Steve crawled in after him, and tugged him backwards until he was right up against Steve’s chest, their bodies warming the sheets as they curled up together.

“Good night, honey,” Steve mumbled into the back of Bucky’s head. Steve’s big hand was cupping Bucky’s pec, the other arm crammed under Bucky’s pillow. There was safety here, in being held in place against the massive shape of Steve’s body.

“Night, Steve,” Bucky answered, whispering into the comfortable darkness of Steve’s room, falling asleep between one breath and the next.

 

* * *

 

 

When Bucky woke, it was to blistering heat in the dark.

There was wet— warmth— a sucking pulling at the tender skin of his neck. Big hands were roving up and down his sides, restless and squeezing. One moment, plucking at nipples, the next, pawing ever downwards until a firm hand was rubbing over the swelling heat of his cock.

He slurred out Steve’s name, exhaustion turned to desire in the merest flash of awareness.

“Buck,” Steve answered, panting into Bucky’s neck, raw and wet against his skin.

From then it was pure animal reaction. Bucky was flipped over onto his belly, with Steve plastered to his back. A weight. A welcome heaviness. An assurance that he was tethered here in this reality.

Steve leaned over him, pressing down on his chest. Bucky’s face was pushed to one side and it was hard to breathe. There was the sound of a drawer yanked open on its rollers, and careless rummaging.

Then Steve was up and off his back, and Bucky breathed in deeply, inhaling greedily, because he could still smell Steve like he was right on top of him.

A single hand split his ass open, prying his cheeks apart just enough for an ice-cold drizzle of lube to splash and spill down his crack, puddling at his hole and streaking down his perineum to the underside of his balls. It was sloppy wet, too wet. It was dripping over him, and he was still lax from before and—

And then Steve was pressing two fingers ruthlessly inside, deep and curling over his prostate like a shock to the system. Bucky’s left hand curled into the sheets, the metal twitching at the rush of untranslatable passion. He could only arch his back against the weight of Steve’s hand on his shoulder, bearing him down onto the bed, and splay his legs wider. Open himself further. Ask, wordlessly, for more.

“God— fuck—” Steve muttered. His voice was low, like the scrape of steel on pavement, with the same strike of intensity that ravaged him until he was shaking slightly at even the smallest of bitten-off curses.

Bucky trembled. “Steve, please—”

The only answer was a huff of air between his shoulder blades, a withdrawal of thick fingers. A shocking emptiness that stung, cold and wet, and then the head of Steve’s cock was rubbing up against his hole, where everything was drenched in lube and soft against the intrusion. It was a breath held, the darkness silent and trembling around his overheated form.

Steve fucked into his body in a single careless thrust, groaning, low and long, into Bucky’s ear. Thick arms settled on either side of Bucky’s shoulders. The weight of Steve’s body settled low on his hips and thighs, and Steve’s calves bracketed his. There was a thrilling pressure as Steve’s cock sunk in, somehow even deeper, as they fell into perfect position, lock and key.

And from there it was rapid-fire, riding a razor edge of hungry brutality that burned in his belly. Skin slapped fiercely against skin, all sweat and lube and slippery friction. Inside of him was just pressure and fullness, the ache of having what he’d most desperately wanted. Every motion felt larger, harder, faster. It was the tug of Steve’s cockhead at his rim, the way his own dick was caught in his fist and the head rubbing up against the jersey sheets, the hot puffs of air at his neck and the stream of mumbled praise that ebbed and flowed mindlessly as Steve fucked him into a sex-drunk oblivion.

“Missed you,” Steve breathed into his ear. “Missed bein’ with you like this. _Fuck._ You take it so sweet, honey, s’like you were made for me.”

Something inside of Bucky fractured at those words, some hard and brittle lump in his chest broke open to the soft, tender core. And he was small again, small under Steve’s weight and small under the power Steve had always held over him, and small and desperately full in all the ways he had not felt since his death.

When Bucky came, it was with a punched-out cry that he buried into the sheets, shocked by the sudden intensity of his own unspooling as he jerked himself through the wracking shudders. And then he was empty, cold, clenching down on _nothing_ , but Steve was coming all over his back, his ass, his thighs— hot splatters of come that burned him where they landed, searing into his skin, marking him.

A huge hand landed on his jaw, and Bucky’s face was turned to the side, and then Steve’s mouth was on his, tongue fucking into his mouth as Steve’s cock rubbed through the come on his backside. His neck was bent at a hard angle but he had to twist himself further and more, rubbing backwards against Steve’s hard body, wringing every last wave of pleasure from his own exhausted body. Steve’s body hair scraped over his back, tickled the soft insides of his thighs. Bucky couldn’t tell where his trembling body ended and Steve’s began. They were one, shaking and tired and messy-wet in the bed, childish lovers that couldn’t help themselves, couldn’t pry themselves apart.

Steve pulled away first, sighing and flopping over next to Bucky. “Hol’ on,” he muttered, rolling out of bed— in between one blink and the next, he was back with a damp washcloth, and then Steve was scraping away the already-cold come from Bucky’s ass and thighs, wiping away the mess with careful warm strokes. Bucky let himself be coddled. He watched through slitted eyes when Steve rolled him away from the wet spot to wipe that up too, uncurled his hand so Steve could clean even between his fingers.

Bucky’s breath was slow, his eyes were slower to open with each successive blink, and yet he felt dazedly aware of the unspooled passage of time as it drifted by. He lay there in a gentle state between sleep and awake, letting himself be tugged away from the wet spot, and pulled onto Steve’s chest. Bucky’s cheek was warmed by the thick slab of Steve’s pec and tickled by the thick hair where he had curled into Steve’s chest. His left hand was tucked away, but his right hand ended up on Steve’s belly, and there he idly rubbed at muscle under skin, enjoying the newly soft give— not fat, or a lack of strength, but the subtle failings of elasticity, the teeniest bit of give in a man Bucky had always feared was made of stone.

A big hand cradled his skull, massaging his scalp. Lips touched his forehead. A sigh against his skin— he fell back asleep, deeper and warmer than before.


	4. Chapter Four

Bucky woke to silence— the windows in the bedrooms were made with some sort of ballistic glass that entombed the whole room. All of Brooklyn was muffled. Sun slanted in over the bed, painting the empty white sheets a sundrenched gold. He looked over his bare shoulder and saw the door was closed.

It was maybe mid-morning, the latest he’d slept in ages. Steve had probably been up with the sun, dragging the sheets back up over Bucky before disappearing quietly to run his miles and drink his protein slurry.

Enjoying just being in Steve’s bed, Bucky stretched from fingertip to tiptoe, enjoying the pop of well-rested joints. His metal arm clicked and shivered in a ripple at the sensation, and he rolled over, drawing out the slow-waking relaxation he hadn’t felt in decades.

There was a bit of lingering stickiness at his groin, the backs of his thighs, and his hair was a little greasy from sleeping so heavily. And yet there was no soreness or lingering ache— merely satisfaction. The stain on the sheets and the well-used towel spoke from themselves, as well.

Turning his head, Bucky pressed the whole side of his face into Steve’s pillows. Breathed in, let the scent of a little cologne and cheap shampoo linger before exhaling. He was naked under the rumpled sheets and felt the faint throb of distant arousal. He was a little hard, a little warm and loose. It wasn’t conscious want so much as instinct that had his hand drifting down to his cock, aimlessly touching himself.

What would Steve think if he saw him now? Saw Bucky lying in the middle of his sex-ruined sheets, still a little dirty from how thoroughly Steve had wrecked him last night. Saw Bucky still horny and needy, touching himself to the barest thought of Steve.

If Steve saw him like this—

Steve would crawl into bed, too. Maybe prop himself up against the headboard and pull Bucky back between his legs. Hold him in place with a hand to his chest and another wrapped around his cock, jerking him off in slow, methodical tugs, whispering to him all the while in that deep voice, little commands played off as sex-hunger rather than bone-deep dominance.

The thought of it had him reaching down to softly palm his balls before dragging his hand up, taking his cock in the loose circle his fingers made. His first few strokes were slow and small, just a couple of little jerks that had Bucky sinking further into the slow, rolling pleasure of it all.

He didn’t feel anything but heady sensation as he lay there in Steve’s bed, legs spread and hand working over his shaft under Steve’s sheets. Not even the buzz of electricity in his metal arm was disconcerting— it was just another sensual vibration of wrung-out nerve clusters. He uncurled his metal fingers from Steve’s sheets, dragging his hand over the bed towards his body.

Carefully, Bucky dragged the metal palm up and over his thigh, where the muscles had been pulled taut. The metal was warm but it moved almost without friction, smoothing over thick hair at the top of his legs. He pulled his fingers together, lifting his palm away from his skin before he spread his fingers back out, skimming closer to the more hairless skin of his inner thigh. The hand on his cock slowed, and he focused on the place where his metal fingertips were swirling over the thin skin of his inner thigh, dipping close to the crease of his ass. The metal only provided the faintest feedback, and his brain had trouble integrating what his fingers felt with the sensation prickling through his skin. But he relished that fragmentation; it was like his body was a living feedback loop, fed by his own desire.

Drawing his knees up, feet flat to the bed, Bucky spread his legs further and kicked the sheet down to the foot of the bed. Gave himself room to play. Like this, he was practically on display, his hole a shy, clenching thing bared to the warm air, his cock jutting up over his fist as he stroked himself off.

Spread like this, it was easy to imagine Steve positioned right between his thighs, Bucky pinned to the bed by just one of Steve’s hands on his chest. Steve could get right inside him like this, fuck him slow and steady, looking down at Bucky all the while. He’d be so good for Steve like this, on display under Steve’s bulk, milking Steve’s thick cock. It would be so good to look up and see Steve above him, the red stain of a blush on his fleshy pecs, dressed with soft greying curls that led to the darker hair trailing down his belly to his groin, where their bodies would be joined. Bucky could almost hear it, the noise of Steve’s cock fucking into his wet insides, deep and slow, just like Bucky wanted.

Bucky jerked himself harder. God, he was already so close, balls tight and ready to pulse out heavy bursts of come. In his fist, his cock throbbed. His hand was all but a blur when he looked down to watch himself, still imagining Steve between his thighs, fucking him—

He smothered a grunt when he came, biting Steve’s pillow, tasting his sweat and soap, desperate and hungry for those last spurts of pleasure. Hot splatters of come decorated his chest, his belly, dripping down his cock. His fist was slick with it, sticking between his fingers.

Closing his eyes and loosening his grip around his spent cock, Bucky lay there and caught his breath for several long moments. The silence was coming back now, and he felt a lonely chill in his belly. He wanted to be with Steve, now, maybe pressed up against his side, or pinned under him. Bucky wanted to press his face to Steve’s shoulder and breathe him in, clean, sweet sweat and laundry detergent. He wanted Steve’s embrace and big, hot hands rubbing up and down his spine. He wanted to straddle Steve’s lap and slowly grind them into a heady daze of arousal, impossible to resist.

Bucky wiped himself down with the already-ruined towel, and grabbed a pair of Steve’s sweatpants from the dresser. He didn’t bother with underwear, instead enjoying the soft pleasure of well-worn cotton as it rasped over his abused cock. And he didn’t bother with a shirt, either, still a little warm and sweaty from jerking off.

Ducking into the bathroom, Bucky cleaned himself up just enough that he didn’t totally reek of last night’s and this morning’s come, and brushed his teeth with Steve’s plain white toothpaste. Bucky looked at himself in the mirror: clean skin still a little damp, shiny white teeth, and hair tangled over his shoulders. He was still a little flush, and he liked what he saw.

His whole body felt light as he went out into the kitchen, the faint sound of Steve’s rustling about growing louder as he made his way down the hall. Bucky wanted to be out there already, right where Steve was so he could be back beside him again.

The sunlight was streaming in through those age-stained windows again, smearing the table a golden yellow. On it sat a plate of fruit, and bread peeping out from a paper sack. Jam in little jars with gingham lids. Steve sat at the table, glasses on on his nose and folders stacked up around him. A crumby plate sat at his elbow. His face was creased in concentration, and when he looked up at Bucky, there was a split second where Bucky saw the shifting gears at work in Steve’s mind.

“Hey, Buck,” he said, all pleasant and refreshed, like he’d been reset somehow. “Come on and sit down. Just going through some more mission specs. You can help me look.”

Having felt so much since last night, it was strange to feel so numb when he looked at Steve. The numbness was replaced with a swift pang of loss, and Bucky realized he had wanted to Steve to kiss him again, to be all sweet and tender, caring. He had wanted Steve to ask him how he felt in the warm morning light after a night together.

This was like 1943 all over again, waking up alone in his own cot, blanket pulled chastely up over his shoulders. This was Steve flirting with Peggy at breakfast. This was another moment without a single breath of acknowledgement of everything between them.

“What the fuck, Steve,” Bucky said. Everything soft and happy inside of him hardened right back into the same sludge it’d been for the last seventy-odd years.

Steve blinked, eyes wide behind the thin reading lenses. The folder in his hand flopped back down onto the table. “Bucky, I— what?”

Bucky walked over to the table, flicked open the uppermost folder. Mission specs, all annotated with Steve’s thin, elegant script. By the looks of it, he’d been through three or four folders already. “More of this bullshit?” he asked. “This is what— this is what you’ve been up to?”

Steve was silent. His lips were pressed into a thin, pensive line. Bucky watched in incredulous silence as Steve took off his glasses and folded them shut. He left them on his folders.

“Why are you so upset, Buck?” There was an awkward, ugly pause. “Is this about last night?”

Bucky couldn’t help the bitten-off noise of disbelief he made. When he crossed his arms, he realized he was still bare chested, and it made him feel small in all the wrong ways. He snatched up an abandoned zip-up hoodie and yanked it on, looking away from Steve because he was too angry to see the stupid, puzzled look on Steve’s face as he dragged the zipper up.

“Buck, really— I thought we—”

But Bucky couldn’t stop himself from cutting Steve off. “Thought fuckin’ _what_ , Steve? We’d go back to the way it was? We fuck and go on missions ‘til one of us dies, or gets an arm blown off? Let me tell you what, pal, I already did that once. It ain’t so fucking great.”

The furrow of Steve’s brow drew more deeply together. His mouth was compressed so hard the faint lines at the corners of his mouth were white. “I have felt guilty about that every day of my goddamn life,” he said. “It shoulda been me, not you. _That’s_ why I have to do this, Buck,” he said, gesturing to the sea of tidy SHIELD folders. “I guess I never said it, but I don’t _expect_ you to go out in the field. Not if you’re not ready. I’d understand.”

Every bit of what Steve was saying was based on the idea that Bucky _would_ be ready eventually. And maybe he would really want to go out and play soldier with Steve all over again— it seemed inevitable that he’d be back out there with a rifle and a scope. But right now, barefooted and angry in Steve’s kitchen, he just felt tired. He was still half-scrambled from his time with Hydra. Maybe sex had distracted him from the shitty way he felt when he got home last night, and jerking off had kept that going over to this morning, but right now, the thought of going on another mission made him want to throw Steve’s kitchen table through the goddamn wall of windows.

Something inside of him just… cracked wide open, every hideous, miserable thing coming out into the day.

“You’re a fuckin’ liability out there, now, Steve,” Bucky bit out. “But you always had to stick your ass out there on the front lines. Never happy unless you were out there instead of in here. The downtime just kills you, huh?”

Steve’s stern face cracked just a little, his dark eyes flashing and the muscle in his square jaw ticking. “Who are you kidding, pal? You were always right there, too. You begged me not to leave you at LeHigh.”

“Yeah.” Bucky agreed, his flesh and bone hand curling into the kitchen counter so he wouldn’t send it through the drywall. “You brought me with you and I was your sidekick. And you fucked me when you couldn’t get into any other trouble.”

“Jesus,” Steve said, abruptly getting to his feet. He looked big. Anger always filled him up to the brim, and indignance always made him seem larger, puffed him right up until he had no choice but to bubble over. “That’s not how it was. We had to be careful—”

“That’s not how it was? What was it, then? What the fuck did you think was going to happen, Steve? When the war was over and we went home?”

Air stuttered out of Steve. He visibly deflated, his shoulders narrowing and all that self-righteous anger draining right out of him like some sort of cork had been pulled. “Buck, after… There was no point in thinking about after, kid. Least of all for people like us. I didn’t think about any of it. There wasn’t any point.”

“Yeah, Steve,” he said, combing his hair away from his face in two handfuls. He felt weary, now, with itchy, tired skin, and he wished for a hairband to get his lank hair off his neck. “I know. I wasn’t such a kid I couldn’t figure that out, pal.”

And if they had both stayed dead, Steve would've been right: there was no point in worrying about what would've faced a couple of queers at home if they never made it back anyway.

There were several long moments where Steve stood still, his fists braced at the edge of the table. He wasn’t the type to hunch, but there was something small and weary about his stance. Bucky stared at the dark places where shadow fell over his downturned face and the way his arms were tight with unspent agitation. When Steve sighed, it wasn’t so much marked by sound but the subtle drooping of those sharp-cornered shoulders. “Buck, sweetheart. You were everything to me back then. My partner. My best friend. That’s never changed.”

The emphatic earnestness was an awkward contrast to the gut-curdling anger Bucky felt. He felt so stupid, seeing Steve out here planning their next mission while Bucky had— what? Forgotten that to love Steve was to wake up alone every morning, like none of it had ever happened? Forgotten that loving Steve meant following him, too? He was maybe ninety-something, or maybe twenty-something, and he was still struggling with how to tell Steve Rogers that loving him sometimes felt like the horrible dread of sitting in military transport, waiting for the final exhilaration of running towards something that was bound to kill you.

Steve looked at him, waiting, and Bucky let his stiff shoulders fall, let the anger leech out of his flesh arm, and didn’t bother to suppress the little twitch of sensation as his left arm recalibrated. He looked at the hard place where his left arm was crossed over his right, from the metal plates overlapping at his bent wrist to the stiff way the fabric sat over the metal arm. “Yeah, I know Steve. But… that’s not enough. Not anymore, pal.” It came out of him softer than he expected, because right up until his mouth was moving, he felt sure it was all going to come out of him so angrily, all bitter and used up, but under that… how he felt about Steve was still this soft, hungry thing. He could help his own tenderness no more than he could help how much he wanted it in return.

When he looked up, he saw that Steve had drawn up a little, no longer resting all his weight against the table, leaning forward into the challenge. Instead, Steve’s fingertips rested lightly on the tabletop— Steve was just a man that didn’t know what to do with his hands, waiting for something that could compel him to move.

But there was nothing to move towards, nothing to beat into submission, nothing to stop dead in its tracks. Bucky felt lightheaded and hot, and the light from the windows hurt his eyes. All the anger was gone, now, and Bucky felt thinner than eggshell, just as fragile as his own memories. He didn’t like how they were just standing here, with a table in between them and an entire war’s worth of secrets.

“Look,” Bucky said, rubbing a hand down over the too-long stubble on his jaw and chin. “Just— let’s sit down. Start over.”

Wordlessly, Steve sank back down onto his chair. While Bucky hesitated, Steve settled into place. He ran his hands through his hair and sighed. He put his big hands on his thighs, taking a moment to adjust the fall of his sweatpants, the fabric rucked up into loose folds over his thighs and groin. The heavy bulge between his legs was pressed along one substantial thigh, visible through the cotton.

That small, fragile feeling remained, magnified by the distance between them. Bucky felt like he couldn’t inhale deeply enough like this, standing in Steve’s kitchen with his arms over his chest, still feeling a smear of dried come on his belly that he’d missed when he’d washed up this morning. His hair was still greasy on his neck, and his shoulders hunched up like he was some kind of sullen kid.

He kept his eyes lowered as he walked over to Steve, not wanting to give away how suddenly childlike he felt. Bucky didn’t hesitate, but sunk right down onto his knees between Steve’s legs, and laid his head on one, burying his face high up on Steve’s thigh, where it was all soft muscle and fat, the place where the body folded and tucked together, flesh and blood origami, complex and simple. The smell here was that concentrated mix of Steve— sweat and fabric softener, something fresh and dirty-clean all at once.

It was a little drugging, actually, and Bucky came back to himself at the feel of Steve’s hands combing through his hair, gently pushing it back away from his eyes and forehead, tucking it behind his ears and away from his neck.

With his eyes pressed closed and his face right to Steve’s thigh, it was easier to think. It took only a couple of minutes until Bucky was able to turn his face towards the streaks of sun as they fell across Steve’s lap. He kept his eyes closed, but at least now he could talk.

“I thought you were trying to trick me, that first time,” Bucky admitted, the curve of his jaw moving against Steve’s leg. “Back at LeHigh, when we were in the tents for the night. I thought everybody knew how queer I was for you, and you were trying to get me to act on it so you could get rid of me.”

Steve paused in methodically wrapping a coil of Bucky’s hair around his finger. Bucky could feel the spiral as it unlooped, and then Steve’s fingers were brushing through his hair again, even more slowly, fingertips dragging along his scalp. “No,” Steve said, slow and quiet. “I wanted you from the first minute I saw you. Never felt anything like it. Before, or after. You’ve always been the best thing I’ve ever seen. The best part of me.”

Blunt fingers rubbed, over and over again, at the tense place where Bucky’s neck met his shoulders— just little circles that radiated outwards and sunk into his body, into the tender little place where his soul was kept. He squeezed his eyes closed, but tears ran out the corner of his eyes in a slow, steady drip, and he felt Steve’s sweatpants grow damp beneath his cheeks. Steve’s breath came in short little drags, and the hand on his neck moved, tentatively petting his hair all over again.

Bucky squeezed his hands where they cupped the back of Steve’s calves, keeping Steve’s thighs wedged apart so he could stay close to that big body, to the warm hollows and creases, to the soft slabs of dense, resting muscle. He was hidden here, shrunk down small enough to admit to the fearful truth he’d buried down deep inside. When he swallowed, it was like there was a fist in Bucky’s throat, wrenching his heart upwards. “You know, I’ve been in love with you since I was seventeen, Steve.” The hand in his hair tightened into a fist, and Bucky’s answering breath was more of a choked and stifled sob. “I never said that to you before. I love you.”

Steve’s hands were buried in his hair, then, and Bucky was helpless to do anything but follow Steve’s pull, letting his head be dragged up and back. His face was cradled, and thumbs were brushing away the wetness from under his eyes. Bucky blinked his eyes open to the bright light pouring in around them, and saw that Steve’s cheeks were dry but his eyes were red-rimmed and glassy, the irises gone too-blue. Steve’s lips were parted but he didn’t speak.

The invisible fist around Bucky’s throat loosened its stranglehold, and he couldn’t help all the words that came pouring out. “It’s hurt me,” he said. “Loving you. Every minute of every day, it’s like getting the shit kicked out of me.” He was crying in earnest now, tears running down his cheeks, dripping in little trails over his neck. Bucky couldn’t really see anything but the outline of Steve’s face, the same in 1943 as it was now, impossibly strong and hard, more familiar to him than anything else, even seen through cloudy eyes. “You have been,” Bucky gasped out the best he could, “the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

His hands were on Steve’s face, and he could feel tears on his right hand, spilling down from Steve’s eyes, and still, Bucky didn’t stop talking. “And still I can’t fuckin’ stop. I can’t,” he insisted. “I’ll end up following you right to the end of the world— Steve— I’ll die with you another hundred times, you hear me?”

Their faces were pressed close together now. Steve was hunched over and Bucky was stretched up, but he didn’t feel the ache of it. He’d done more for less, for Steve. Their mouths were so close it was almost like kissing, but instead, Bucky just kept talking. They had kissed so many times before now, but never spoken like this, and he couldn’t stop.

“But I’ll leave,” he said, and carried on over the sound of Steve’s gutted inhale, “I’ll leave before I let it be like it was. I mean it, Steve. I can’t— I don’t care about anyone else, but I’m not pretending with you anymore. No more.”

Steve nodded, and Bucky felt their faces move together, the both of them holding onto each other so tightly it was like every movement was shared. The motion of the nod was quick, sharp, a decision made on gut feeling alone. Bucky could feel the quick rise and fall of Steve’s chest, both of them dragging in huge, greedy lungfuls of air. They were rubbing away their tears, scrubbing away with their thumbs all the hurt pain that had leaked out of their bodies.

They were mostly breathing normally when Steve spoke. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, their lips moving in a chaste kiss, the most chaste thing they’ve shared by far. “I’m so sorry, Buck.”

“Yeah,” Bucky murmured. “I know, pal. Me too.”

“Will you stay?”

“I want to. I really want to, Steve.”

They sighed at the same time, bodies sinking and shuddering in unison, and Bucky cracked a smile. It was easier to smile now, after the crying. A smile felt like a manageable beginning after everything he’d felt this morning, every churning emotion that had been yanked out of the places they’d been hiding since 1943.

“How about we go lie down,” Bucky said, pulling his hands away from Steve’s face. They stood up, knees and shoulders banging together as they got to their feet. “I jerked off this morning, thinking about waking up next to you.”

Steve curled a hand around Bucky’s waist, and his face pressed into Bucky’s neck, where his hair was loose and sticking to his tear-streaked skin. He could feel Steve’s laughter, still shuddery and hiccuping from crying. “Buck, that’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Told you,” Bucky muttered into the side of Steve’s head, where his hair was short and soft against his mouth. “Been crazy about you since I was a kid.”

Steve cradled the back of his head with his hand, and then they were looking at each other. Steve’s eyes were dry but still red, his golden skin splotchy. He stared at Bucky, his mouth gone serious and firm. A lock of white hair flopped down over his eyebrow, and he looked young and old, a perfect marriage of the young guy from the war, and the older man of now. “I love you, Buck,” he said, seriously. Bucky felt it in his whole body, in the electrical twitch of his metal arm, prosthetic fingers curling into Steve’s shirt; in the hot, happy feeling that was anchored in his belly; in the shaky tremble of his knees; in the flick of his tongue over too-dry lips.

“Love you, too, Steve,” Bucky answered, his itchy eyes crinkling up as he smiled. Steve smiled too, and it was blinding, lit up and glowing from whatever hot, wonderful thing kept Steve moving forward when a lesser man might’ve sat down.

The hallway back to the bedroom was still dark, with no windows— just puddles of light that dribbled out of the open doorways. It was too narrow to fit side-by-side, but they managed a sort of sideways sprawl of feet and angles, the corners of their shoulders crossed and balanced— their bodies nudging in and out, against the walls and each other. They touched each other’s waists, the small of their backs.

They stopped before Steve’s bedroom— Bucky found himself almost inside, back pressed to the door frame. Steve’s hands cinched around his waist, and for once, it was simple to give into the impulse towards intimacy. Bucky put his hands on Steve’s arms, the backs of them, just above the elbow, and tugged him even closer.

“I thought about you,” Steve said. He was still a little taller than Bucky, and his mouth was more level with Bucky’s cheek than his mouth. “When I had this place done up. I thought about you being here with me.” The hands squeezed tighter. “I’ve missed you every day you’ve been gone. I thought about you every day, and I never thought—”

“Me either.”

In the room, the bed was unmade, sheets dragged open. It was messy, stained from last night, but dry enough. Bucky shed the hoodie and crawled into bed, dropping onto his bare belly. He buried his face into the pillow and breathed, and was rewarded when he felt Steve curl up at his back, skin to skin. He wiggled against Steve’s chest, and let Steve wrap his arms around him. Their fists were knotted together beneath Bucky’s chin, metal and flesh overlapping.

There were bruises across Steve’s knuckles, cuts that had sealed together neatly, healing. All of the marks had already gone from Bucky’s body, equilibrium restored with a night’s rest. The way Bucky remembered it, Steve’s body would heal bruises almost before they had bloomed, his cuts would scab up and flake away like nothing. But here was proof of an unforgiving humanity, a frailness of body that seemed unlikely after almost eighty years of titanic strength.

Bucky looked at the hands and the rumpled linen, and felt the warmth of Steve’s breath as it moved on the back of his neck. They were pressed together right down to their feet.

“I don’t think you should be Captain America anymore,” Bucky said. “I think you should give the shield to Sam.”

Steve shifted, the arm under Bucky’s neck pulling away like Steve was trying to sit up, but Bucky adjusted his hold on Steve’s hands. He slipped his hands around Steve’s wrists like manacles and squeezed— squeezed until it was just shy of bone-breaking. He could see where his metal hand was pinching Steve’s skin a little too tightly. He’d never knowingly put his hands on Steve like this before. Before his death, he’d never been strong enough to fight Steve with brute strength when they play-fought. And when he got his mind back— well, Bucky never wanted to hurt Steve the way he did when he was sick.

“Feel that?” Bucky asked. His voice came out rough. He squeezed harder for the briefest second. “‘M not even trying.” Bucky let go and Steve’s hands hovered in the air, abused flesh gone white where Bucky had held him, ringed with red. He gathered Steve’s hands back up, this time gently cupping them between his palms and bringing them back against his chest. “I’m not saying you couldn’t fight me back. You could for a while, but I’d still wipe the floor with you, pal.”

Of course, it wasn’t like Steve to let something like that just _happen_ to him, so Bucky was already halfway to tensing, anticipating the moment when Steve tried to get on top of him and pin him. Steve’s legs shifted, he could feel the shift of muscles in Steve’s body as it played against his...

A few twists and a a jerk of his arms and— it was terrifyingly simple to pin Steve, to sit on his hips and hold Steve’s arms to his chest with the force from his metal arm. “Steve, look at me.”

There was red, high and dark, on Steve’s cheeks. His hair was dishevelled from their tussle, and his blue eyes were blazing like fire. He looked gorgeous like this, and some part of Bucky went liquid just from looking at him. It wasn’t just sex, but fear, as well, and he sat down more firmly on Steve’s thighs, as if pinning him in the here and now was enough to keep him safe and sound in the long run.

“Steve, c’mon,” Bucky said. “You really think going out on missions is the best use for you, pal? You’re not the same guy anymore, Steve. There’s no shame in that.”

Steve struggled, and Bucky allowed him to push up on his elbows, still keeping his knees locked around Steve’s hips. “You think I wanted you out there, back in the war?” There was anger, a little bit of bitterness. Regret, maybe. “I let you go along with me.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agreed. He ran his hand through Steve’s hair, smoothing it into place. He was gentle, coaxing it back to the combed look Steve had worn during the war. It was a bit incongruous, what with the white hair shorter than it had been in the forties, but it made Steve look a little like the serious, driven kid Bucky remembered from back then. “And then you had to watch me die, and there’s no reason I should’ve come back at all. No reason. And it wasn’t even lucky. It was a miserable three-quarters of a century, pal. My brain’s half-fried still. Nerves are all fucked up. I did a lot of bad things. And that’s about all I’m sure about these days.”

He saw that Steve was thinking about talking, narrow lips parted, so Bucky kept going.

“I know if we went out fighting together, it’d be just like the old times. We could probably hack it for a while. A long while,” he said, rueful. “I’m a lot better now than I used to be.

“But I just— I don’t fuckin’ want to _do_ that anymore. I’ve been fighting since 1943 and I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want to go out on dark op after dark op, and I don’t want you to, either.”

Steve looked at him, and it seemed a little like disappointment. “Buck, sweetheart. You know what it’s like out there. We can’t just sit back and wait for someone else to swoop in and take care of everything.”

Bucky sighed. He leaned down, and swiped one kiss, and then another, across the firm set of Steve’s mouth. “Steve, we’re not kids anymore. We’re not even close to young anymore.”

“You’re asking me to retire.”

“Did you see yourself? You got up after fucking me and started planning out six months of work for us.”

Steve had enough shitty grace to look a little shamed at that. “I just— I thought it was the right thing to do.”

Humming in acknowledgement, Bucky ran his fingers over Steve’s eyebrows, down the sides of his face. “I think maybe we just need some time. Time for me to get my head straight. Time for Dr. Cho to figure out what’s going on with you.”

Steve’s head tipped to the side, breaking eye contact with Bucky. “They might not fix this,” he said. Bucky saw Steve’s jaw working, the hard bob of his Adam’s apple when he swallowed. “This might be it.”

Bucky looked at his metal hand, perched on Steve’s chest, held lightly against the fleshy swell of Steve’s pec. He ran fingers over the plush but textured circle of his nipple, careful to keep the plates from pinching together on Steve’s tender flesh. “Would that be so bad?”

Steve’s eyes were closed. His jaw was solid, bulging from the strain of gritting his teeth. “Maybe.”

Bucky’s metal fingers gleamed, rubbing left and right over the soft tip of Steve’s nipple. “You’re still Commander Rogers,” he said, slowly, thinking. “You were never just… fuckin’ brute strength. You’ve always been smarter than that. You’re a leader. I wasn’t— I wasn’t following you just because I love you, Steve.”

“Aw, Buck—” Steve said, turning back to finally meet Bucky’s eyes again. Steve looked a little frustrated, mouth all pursed and stiff. Almost childish, really. He was still propped up on his elbows, and the pose had his shoulders all hunkered up by his ears. “What’s that fuckin’ matter, though?”

“You were never going to be young forever, Steve.”

Steve sighed, and Bucky felt Steve’s lips kiss his thumb where it was pressing against his lips. “I just thought I’d have more time. There’s still so much to do.”

Bending down, Bucky replaced his thumb with his mouth— just sweet and close-mouthed, brief. “Yeah, I know.”

There was no reason to keep sitting on Steve’s thighs, so he rolled to one side, and they settled back down like they hadn’t been scuffling at all. Steve’s big arm came around his shoulders, and Bucky pressed his ear to Steve’s chest. His hand found Steve’s chest again too, this time his right hand gently scratching through the hair, playing mindlessly with the soft fur.

“Would it be so bad? To hang back a little? Do something different? Just be me and you for a little while?”

Bucky felt a barely-there kiss to the side of his head. “Maybe not,” Steve allowed.

“There’s always gonna be another fight, Steve. I know enough to count on that.” Bucky looked over Steve’s chest to the dirty, stained sheets. He saw their discarded clothes on the floor, the closet door ajar. He saw where Steve’s body disappeared under the sheet. Under Bucky’s own body. “But I want this, too.”

 

* * *

 

 

Bucky came back from the library in the late afternoon, new books arranged carefully in his backpack so none of the pages would get mashed during the crowded subway ride home. The front room was empty when he came in, so he left his books on the table by the couch and wandered down the hall.

His old room had been converted into an office. At the end of the room closest to the door was a desk, dressed with a computer and piles of SHIELD paperwork, more of those folders and personnel evaluations in tidy little stacks. There was still a big office with Steve’s name on it at SHIELD, but Steve didn’t spend as much time there now, just doing a little training with younger agents, attending staff meetings, briefings and debriefings. The rest of his work was all done in here, where art hung on the walls and sports radio played low in the background.

Today Steve was at the other end of the office, at the old wooden drafting table they’d bought at a flea market upstate. It had needed a little work to smooth out some splinters and worn-off stain, and the metal tilt mechanism was still a little fussy. Steve had carried it into this room himself and carefully arranged it by the window, so light could pour in through the gauzy white curtains onto the flat of it.

It was MLB postseason commentary today, set to a low, soothing grumble that was halfway drowned out by the sound of Steve’s off-key humming and his pencil scratching across the page. An empty coffee cup sat on the floor next to Steve’s stool, and his bare feet were perched on the lowest rung, legs spread wide. His right foot bounced in now-familiar concentration.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve said without looking up. “Thought you’d be later.”

“I was quick today. Train wasn’t even that late.”

Steve snorted, bending closer to his drawing. “Luckiest man in New York, right here.”

Bucky hooked his chin over Steve’s left shoulder, careful not to jostle him as he worked. He put light hands at Steve’s waist and squeezed for just a second. Steve’s cotton t-shirt was washed to the point of total softness, and Bucky let himself trace happy little circles into Steve’s belly.

“Is that LeHigh?” he asked. To the left on the page was a half-sketched building— it looked like the long, plain barracks. The parade grounds stretched across the rest of the background, flagpole outlined to the right. Boxy outlines of men were running two by two across the foreground.

Steve was adding detail to the two men at the front. “Yeah. Been on my mind, lately.” The tall man on the left was broad, muscular, with a square jaw. At the taller figure’s side was a shorter man, slender, hair shaded dark already. They were both looking ahead at the track that would lead them in a loop around LeHigh.

“I thought about it a lot, at first, too. When my memories were coming back.”

The pencil slowed, and stopped. Steve straightened, and Bucky followed, standing upright so Steve could lean back against his chest. The pencil found a home in the groove at the bottom of the drafting table, and Steve put his hands over Bucky’s, slotting their fingers together.

“Why is that, do you think? Out of everything, why LeHigh?”

There was the faintest twitch in the fingers of Bucky’s left hand. It was a little oddity that persisted, no matter how much the last few months had helped smooth out the shortages in his brain. “S’where everything started. Last time I was a kid. We were scared, but we had no fuckin’ idea of what, yet.”

Steve was quiet for a long minute, his head back against Bucky’s shoulder. Soft, white hair tickled the underside of Bucky’s jaw as Steve spoke. “When I woke up here, I asked for you. It was the first time since LeHigh I’d ever really been without you.”

Bucky closed his eyes. He turned his face to the warm, smooth place behind Steve’s ear, short hair tickling his nose. The smell of Steve’s body was the sort of comfort he could draw right into his own, down into his very bones. Even here and now with Steve, Bucky didn’t want to think about those first days after his own death. It was a long, dark trench that ran down the split in his brain. His unmaking, in a way— a thing he wasn’t yet ready to excavate just yet.

But someday. Every day, Bucky woke up and put his boots on and felt a little better for it.

After that, they cleared out of the office to get on with the rest of their day. They stood side by side at the kitchen counter and seared their pot roast while Bucky told Steve about the books he’d gotten from the library. Bucky chopped vegetables while Steve used a pair of tongs to flip the roast from side to side.

“I’m just sayin’. I think there’s something wrong with you.”

Steve shot him a look, tipping the roast onto its last pink side. “Because I don’t enjoy the same books you do?”

“Yeah.”

“What a good reason,” Steve said drily, reaching over and snagging a carrot, narrowly avoiding a slap to the hand.

They left the roast on the stove to cook for a few hours and went into the living room. Bucky laid flat on his belly on the couch, while Steve snagged the pillow from under Bucky’s ankles and lay down on the floor, where sun shone down in unruly waves over the hardwood. Steve lay right flat on his back, and Bucky hid a grin at the familiar popping of Steve’s back as he cracked it, and the sigh of relief that followed. Bucky snuggled into the cushion with a sigh of his own, and reached out with metal fingers to gently rub at Steve’s creased forehead.

If Bucky was careful to just use the tips of his fingers— and if he was careful not to drag them across Steve’s eyebrows— there wasn’t any pinching or pulling, just the creases of Steve’s face slowly softening under the back and forth drag of almost-skin temperature metal. He didn’t have quite enough sensitivity to really _feel_ Steve relax under his hand, but Bucky could see it in the way Steve’s face gave into a sleepy contentedness. The grooves in his forehead smoothed out first, which led to a pretty droop to his crow’s feet. His jaw unclenched, no longer grinding up so tight and stiff, and his cheeks softened from the crest of his cheekbone to the faint hollows beneath.

But Bucky’s favorite part was how sweet Steve’s mouth looked when he relaxed. The lower curve of his bottom lip would stick out a bit, but the corners of his mouth curled upwards, a hint of a smile on an otherwise tired face. It was the smile of a content man, a man who fell asleep on his sunny living room floor, lulled by the quiet, easy touch of someone who loved him.

 _That_ was the Steve who Bucky loved with a syrupy-sweetness, the tenderest part of his insides and the warm, happy corner of his heart that was all Bucky's. A private allowance of love, new and a hundred years old at once, but no longer fragile.

Time moved funny when they lay around like this. It was as bright and glossy as the bright sunfall, but unfocused and meandering like dust motes and cloud-cast shadows.

Bucky slid soundlessly off the couch and onto the floor next to Steve, balancing his weight and catching himself before he banged his toes into the hardwood. Steve didn't open his eyes, but the smile lines around his mouth deepened, lips quirking and smoothing out just as Bucky scooted towards him. A big arm came around Bucky’s shoulders, drawing him even closer until he had curled an arm over Steve’s big large chest, thrown a leg across Steve’s thighs, and buried his face in Steve’s neck.

“How was your appointment today?” Steve asked, his voice slow with sleep.

Pressing his lips together, Bucky squeezed in all the places where he was wrapped around Steve’s body. “Fine,” he said. He didn’t like to talk about his weekly visits with Dr. Cho, informal as they were, but he liked that Steve asked, that Steve acknowledged each one.

“That’s good,” Steve said, and Bucky felt his jaw move, felt Steve twist his neck to press a kiss to Bucky’s forehead, warm and dry.

Steve’s hand began to drag up and down Bucky’s back in deliberate strokes,: firm circles were rubbed into Bucky’s neck, then a slow drag down the spine, until Steve’s fingers were stroking just above the cleft of his ass. Those warm, molasses-slow fingers would press just into the place where his cheeks parted— and then they would be gone, dragging back upwards again.

Humming, Bucky leaned into Steve, affecting a sort of carelessness to the way he smoothed his hand over the soft swell of Steve’s pecs, down to the gently delineated muscles of his belly, then lower still. Lower, over the place where his thick cock was half-hard against the waistband of his sweatpants, the fat head raised up a little, tenting the fabric.

Steve thrust up, his cock rolling smoothly against Bucky’s palm. “Suck me off?” he asked.

“What’s in it for me?”

There was a groan, and Bucky hid his smile in Steve’s neck, deftly massaging Steve’s balls through the fabric.

“I’ll suck you off after— please, Buck,” Steve begged.

It didn’t take much to get Steve going these days, and barely anything more than a touch to get him panting for it. They fucked more than ever now— war had made sex intense, a release to be hungrily consumed and craved. Now, _now_ though, it was the intensity of fucking freely, of crying out loud into their home and teasing each other into arousal from across their living room.

Bucky was just as fucking hungry for it, too, and that made it impossible to say no.

He slid his hand up Steve’s shaft one last time and sat up, pecking Steve on the lips before getting on his feet and out of Steve’s reach. “Here,” he said, sitting right at the edge of the couch cushion. “Come give it to me, then.” He licked his lips and unzipped his own jeans, shoving them down his thighs far enough to get his cock out, hard and flushed against the pale skin of his belly.

Steve’s eyes got darker, and he was up on his feet and in front of Bucky in less time than it took to a get a good rhythm going as Bucky started jerking himself off. Steve was already shoving his sweats down to his knees, shuffling forward with his cock in his fist, and Bucky bent his neck, opening up his mouth and sticking out his tongue, wet and ready for it.

He closed his lips around the fat tip of Steve’s dick, tasting salty slickness as he dragged his tongue across the head before sucking properly. A firm suck, and he pulled a couple more inches into his mouth. Then his eyes slid shut, brain going quiet except for the basest, dirtiest parts of him.

Taking his hand off his own swollen cock, Bucky reached up and cupped the fuzzy weight of Steve’s balls, letting them rest in his palm as he swallowed deeper and harder. Steve’s hands moved idly at the back of Bucky’s head, the pressure too soft to really push Bucky’s mouth further down on Steve’s thick red cock, but too focused to be anything more than a wordless plea for more. Swallowing, Bucky pushed forward, relaxing his jaw and working his tongue over the underside of Steve’s cock until his nose was finally pushed right up against the lowest part of Steve's abs.

His eyelids felt too heavy to open, and Bucky realized that he was desperately petting Steve’s side with his left hand, the metal skating up and down, traversing the rippling plain of Steve’s tender belly. The sensory feedback he got was all mismatched, a partial sensitivity— but there was nothing more that he liked better to feel with this hand than Steve. It was the thing he knew best, more than his own body, and to feel it anew through metal and wire was maybe more than he thought he deserved.

Big hands traced up and down the back of his neck, sweeping up his hair in fistfuls and pulling. Bucky hummed and let himself be dragged backwards, lips sucking tightly over superheated skin, wet with spit. He breathed in deeply from his nose, sucking in the heady musk of Steve’s sweaty skin, and his exhale turned into a groan. The sound was thick, muffled by the way Steve’s cock lay heavy on his tongue, stuffing up his mouth and making his lips shine.

Steve’s hands went slack in his hair, and Bucky leaned forward, sucking again and again in quick, hungry swallows that had nose brushing over Steve’s belly with each hungry motion.

“Buck,” Steve groaned. “Tha’s it,” he slurred, “M’ gonna come.”

He could feel it, feel the way Steve’s balls were all tight and heavy in his hand, taste the bitter wet pool of precome sliding across his tongue. Bucky wanted more, wanted the final exhalations of Steve's pleasure in his ears and the taste and feel of it inside of him.

Steve murmured praise, until all the words broke apart, splintering into shaky groans and desperate pants. Come spilled into the back of Bucky’s throat, and Steve’s hands tightened in his hair, and he swallowed until there was nothing left but the sound of Steve panting.

Letting Steve’s cock fall from his mouth, he sank back against the couch cushions, panting happily and rolling his tongue around the inside of his mouth. He thumbed at his swollen lower lip, wiping away the sticky wet that clung to his skin. “Good?” he asked, watching Steve awkwardly drag his sweatpants up over his softening cock.

Steve laughed, and bent forward to press his mouth to Bucky’s. Fingers teased at a nipple through his t-shirt, and Bucky jerked at the tweak of it. “Course it was,” he said. Steve got down onto his knees, sliding his hands all over Bucky’s body as he went. Bucky’s breath caught in his throat as he looked down at Steve, shouldering his way between Bucky’s thighs, spreading him wide.

“Here,” Steve said, yanking Bucky’s jeans further down his thighs, over his knees. He pressed a kiss to the firm ridge of muscle that ran down the inside of Bucky’s thigh, tickling the hairs and sending shivery little shockwaves moving right to his groin. Bucky let Steve pull his jeans and underwear off, dragging them over one foot and then the other and dropping them to the side. “That’s better,” Steve said, his voice low and quiet. “Now I can see you.” Hands caressed the outsides of his thighs, massaging. They pressed upwards, digging into the place where Bucky’s meaty muscle gave way to his ass cheeks, teasing Bucky to arching his hips upwards needily. When Bucky looked down the line of his own body to the place where Steve sat, he could see his own cock against his belly, trailing wetly on his skin.

Steve leaned forward— not enough to take the head of Bucky’s cock into his mouth, but close enough that he could feel Steve’s warm breath moving over his shaft, over the sensitive skin of his sac. “You ready, sweetheart?”

“Yeah, Steve, ‘m ready,” Bucky said.

A hot pink tongue dragged, long and slow, up the underside of Bucky’s cock. “You sure, kid? C’mon, tell me,” Steve coaxed.

Bucky’s thighs were tense. He wanted Steve to swallow him down, to suck him off until there was nothing left. Until he was crying with the feel of Steve’s hot mouth working him over and over until it hurt.

Steve’s hands tightened up on his ass, and a choked sound jumped out of his mouth. Bucky was tugged forward, back sliding against the cushions.

“Please, Steve,” he whispered. “Want you to suck me off. Need it.”

That was apparently all it took, because Steve’s mouth was around his cock in the next instant, making everything in Bucky’s mind go soft and fuzzy. All he could think about had narrowed down to the tight suction of Steve working over his cock, head bobbing again and again in Bucky’s lap.

Bucky buried his left hand in the back of Steve’s shirt, curling the fabric into his fist. He could already feel it twitching and whirring with his pleasure, the rush of desire tangling with mechanical output. Under his right hand, there was just the superfine softness of Steve’s short hair as he stroked the back of Steve’s head again and again. Carefully, carefully. Moving his fingers from the soft, smooth skin behind Steve’s ear to the ticklish hairs at the nape of his neck, then back up again, to the slightly longer hair on the top of his head. Bucky tried to ground himself, to distract himself from the relentless pressure of Steve’s filthy mouth, but it was useless.

He couldn’t look anymore, but he also couldn’t stop looking, either. He was stuck staring at the way Steve’s cheeks hollowed out as he sucked harder, how his shiny red lips moved up and down, constantly kissing the fist Steve had wrapped around the base of Bucky’s cock.

When he came, it was all but dragged out of him, Bucky’s whole body seized up in pleasure, when all he wanted was for this feeling to go on forever. He emptied desperately down the hot, sucking warmth of Steve’s throat, unable to catch his breath and feeling tight from head to toe as he struggled not to jerk his cock further and further into Steve’s mouth.

Steve drew away slowly, leaning back and rolling his shoulders as he pulled his hands off of Bucky’s thighs. Bucky felt shaky and loose, all tired and sated, and he smiled, probably looking like a dope, as he watched Steve lick his lips clean.

“Good?” Steve asked, and Bucky was hopelessly charmed at how sweetly smug Steve was, grinning at him as he got up off his knees.

“Think you know it was. Don’t ask stupid questions, pal.”

That just got him another shit-eating grin, only bigger and dumber than usual. Steve leaned down to kiss him again, all over, but Bucky didn’t even feel stupid, sitting there, cock soft and wet on his thigh, bare-assed on his couch and kissing the man he loved best in the world.

“Put some pants on,” Steve said. “We can go walk down to the water while we’re waiting for the roast to finish cooking.”

Bucky grabbed the hem of Steve’s shirt. Pulled him down for one more kiss that went on and on, until Bucky’s neck ached and he was getting breathless all over again.

“Yeah, yeah,” he murmured into Steve’s lovely mouth, hand moving gently over the hard corner of Steve’s jaw. “Whatever you say, Commander.”

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to NurseDarry for her incredibly patient and careful beta reading of this fic. Without her, this would've been a much bumpier ride for all of us, and probably very embarrassing for me (oh! the errors I have made & was never going to be able to edit myself out of!).
> 
> The author would also like to thank colbaltmoony, for her incredible artwork and encouragement when I felt like I was constantly writing myself into very stupid corners. Simply put, this fic would not exist without colbaltmoony's art, inspiration, and motivation. Thank you for making my very first bang experience so ideal, and for being my partner in smut & angst. Every part of this story was made better for your wise input & kindness.
> 
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